


tell me what you know about dreaming

by srkwords



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Humor, It's okay guys there's some sex now, Main Questline, Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 21:11:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 52,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5390612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/srkwords/pseuds/srkwords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A woman out of time, a man out of caps. Two people colliding in a world that neither knows how to fit into properly. A story told in snapshots - main story, adventures, falling, finding, fucking, and all the friends and freak shows they come across in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. before the war

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is an introduction to Yoshimi, our sole survivor, before the bombs fell. You won't be meeting Mac until the third chapter, which is coming within the next day. He's comin', though, don't worry.

“You have a healthy baby girl, Mr. Shu. Eight pounds, eight ounces.”

“Lucky eights. That’s a good sign.”

“Have you and your wife chosen a name?”

“Yoshimi. Her name will be Yoshimi.”

-

Callahan. Nate Callahan. She rolled his name around in her mouth like a peppermint, letting it fill in the space under her tongue, between her teeth. She exhaled and he was close enough to smell the bourbon on her tongue. “Yoshimi. I’m… Yo… Yoshimi.”

“That’s a peculiar name.”

“You’re a peculiar man. Why are you talking to me again?”

“I can’t stand a pretty girl drinking all by her lonesome.”

“Maybe I want to be alone. I’m celebrating my loneliness.”

“I doubt that. What are you really celebrating?”

“Celebrating a life free from presumptuous men like yourself… and… okay, I just closed a really important case. I’m a civil rights lawyer…” She stifled a burp against the back of her hand, “…with a short list of drinking buddies.” A shrug. Small, tight-lipped smile. Here’s my opening, he thought. Her fingers wrapped tightly around a crystal tumbler, empty save for the honey-water remnants of her last drink. His eyes darted down, then back up, down again, up.

“Don’t presume I’m presumptuous. You’re obviously smart enough to know better.” A wide grin followed, wielded like a knife to her throat. A single strand of hair fell from his finely gelled coif down onto his forehead, red, burning - she was down in flames before she could even protest his offer to buy her another round.

-

Three months later she said I do in the office of a judge she no longer remembers the name of. She wore a cream colored lace dress, knee-length, and had lilies braided into her thick, black hair by the widower in the studio next to her own off Cambridge. Heavy lidded eyes blinked, astounded, from under a veil – her mother’s veil – up at the six foot two brick of an Irishman she was about to call her husband. His eyes were so blue they felt almost-wrong, electric, as if she got too close they’d turn her whole body into ash. The way he was looking at her in that moment was a mixture of six things: adoration, lust, possessiveness, cockiness, excitement, and the strangest hint of bewilderment.

When she said I do, she almost couldn’t believe it. The words tumbled form her mouth like crystals from a magician’s purse. 

“Yoshimi Callahan...” She whispered as his lips pressed against her own insistently. She wasn’t sure if it sounded right, but at the very least, she conceded, it didn’t sound wrong.

-

“No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not now. Not now. No. Oh no. No, no, no.”

She laid on the bathroom floor, pulling herself in as tight a ball as she could with the hopes that, if she tried hard enough, she’d curl in on herself and disappear.

It took two hours before she worked up the courage to get up, stand in front of the mirror, fix her mascara, exhale slowly, and pick up the small plastic piece with two pink lines spelling out her future on it’s side. She knew he’d be excited. She knew he wouldn’t understand why she wasn’t. 

-

“How about Shea? M’ grandpa’s name was Shea.”

“Mm, no.”

“Atticus? George? Niall? Jack?”

“No, no, definitely no, probably not.”

“Then what?”

“My father… my father’s name was Shen.”

“What about Shaun?”

“That… yeah, that’s nice.”

-

She felt like she was so large small things were going to start orbiting her. A steady stream of coffee cups, pens, spare change just bobbing in oblong around her torso. Every part of her body hurt. Her knees felt like they were made of gelatin, her spine felt like it was made of splinters. Each breath caught, heavy and full in her chest, like the air was filled with the tiniest pieces of broken glass. 

She felt trapped, in a new suburban home, in too many too soon commitments, in a body that was rebelling against her at every turn.

When he came home from work that day and sat down at the table, reaching out and taking her small hand in his own, almost twice as big, she felt a soft surge of affection radiate out from her chest. It expanded outward, warming her to her edges, as he pressed his cheek against her round stomach, rubbing gently. His voice was soft when he spoke.

“I think you should take some time off after he’s born, at least a year. I make enough. He needs his mother.”

The warmth, like usual, became too hot. She pulled away a little too fast, turning an angle to look outside at the rose bushes, her thoughts racing but her mouth silent. Her words came slowly, deliberately, spoken to the window instead of his face.

“They need me, Nate… They need me too. You don’t understand what it’s like for them. It’s not safe to be Chinese these days. Someone needs to be in their corner, now more than ever.”

He didn’t waver. Just repeated. “He needs his mother.”

The conversation was over. The cigarette she snuck on the back porch that evening to take the edge off tasted sweet and lethal, like gasoline. Like regret.

-

The birth came quickly, painfully, intense. Yoshimi refused medication – she wanted to feel it and no one was going to convince her otherwise. She reclaimed some of her independence as she screamed, as he crowned, as she clutched the sides of the hospital bed so hard that her fingers stayed pale for hours afterwards.

The Miss Nanny that delivered her son exclaimed, “Eight pounds, eight ounces!”

“Lucky eights,” sighed Yoshimi as she let her eyes get heavy, close.

-

“You’ll do great, hun.”

The darted in and out of one another’s way in front of the mirror, in step but not in sync. When he touched her elbow gently, she leaned into it, but ducked away when he tilted his head to kiss her jaw. 

The night before they yelled. They yelled about expectations, about her feeling lost and alone. About missing her job. About responsibilities, devotion, destruction. About the PFC on base she knew he had been flirting with. About the tenuous strands holding their relationship together. About her fear that they rushed into everything and the house of cards that was starting to show it’s suits.

When they made love afterwards, it was angry. It was passionate. It didn’t solve things, but it put a pause to them. A stop. A period. It gave them a single, solitary moment to breathe. When he came, it was inside her, and she felt tears hot on her cheeks as she held him to her with her legs crossed behind his back. She whispered “sorry” and “I don’t know” over and over. He kissed her behind her ear and said, “We’ll figure this out.”

“I do love you. I love both of you. I love Shaun. I love you. I… I don’t know.”  
“I love you. We’ll figure this out. I love you, I love you, I love you. It’ll get better.”

She tilted her head looking at herself in the mirror. A soft lavender bruise appeared underneath her left ear, where he kissed her just a little too hard the night before. She shifted her hair to cover it, sighed, and left the bathroom. She had a baby to tend to. She had a life to lead.  
-

A few hours later the bombs dropped and they never got a chance to discover what “better” could have been.

-

When she woke up 200 years in the future, the first thing she noticed was that bruise, still lavender, in her reflection in the glass of her husband’s cryo chamber.


	2. emergence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoshimi's first few months out of the vault. An introduction to the person she's becoming outside of the vault. The start of a journey. The beginning of a rebirth.

Nothing could have prepared her for the way her eyes burned as she emerged from the Vault. 200 years without sunlight made her eyes milky and weak. She fell to her knees, gasping the foreign air of an unfamiliar landscape, her eyelids squeezed shut and her hands balled up into tiny fists. 

The scream that tore from her throat as she knelt, collapsed, on top of the cliff overlooking Sanctuary Hills was visceral. It burned with guilt, anger, sadness. It burned with vengeance.

It took Codsworth three bottles of purified water and twelve minutes of mindless prattling before she could even utter a word.

The word was: “Fuck.”

The robot butler’s gasp, aghast at her profanity, caused a restrained giggle to slide its way from her throat. The giggle turned into a few peals of open-mouthed laughter, those laughs turned into crying, rolling, shrieking hysterical guffaws on the front lawn of her old home. “I think I’m losing it, Codsworth.” She reached up to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

Another chuckle, softer this time, a hint of her genuine sadness rising from the absurdity of the entire situation. “This can’t be real. Some strangers stole Shaun, shot Nate, it’s 200-some years in the fucking future and I’m fine and fucking dandy? This can’t be happening.” Her voice was at least three octaves higher than usual, rising to a fever pitch with each word she spoke.

“I’m afraid it is, mum.”

If robots could look bashful, Codsworth would have taken that moment to lower his eyes and blush solemnly.

-

There were few words you could use to describe a woman like Yoshimi. One of them was fierce, another was focused. Intense. Passionate. Clever. And, despite 200 years of sleep: tired.

Someone who knew her well enough would even consider another word: violent. Violent in the Shakespearean sense, a sentinel of righteous fury, a woman tired of letting the world dictate her place in it without asking her first.

They spent two hours digging through the wreck of her old neighbor’s homes, looking for clues. Looking for anything, really. She came out of it with a small stack of materials that seemed like they could be useful: a 10 mm pistol, a decent stockpile of bullets, a military surplus style backpack, a few canned goods, bottled water, and a pile of random junk Codsworth told her could be repurposed into new things. 

“I’ve studied a bit on building while you and sir have been away, I should be able to help!” He bobbed, adjacent to her, almost eagerly. She tucked the gun into the belt of her vault suit and shrugged on a leather arm-piece that seemed like it could be armor. She loaded the gun (a brief memory of Nate surfaces: him, at the dinner table, barefoot, cleaning his pistol, she walks in, sits on his lap, he shows her, she practices a few times, becoming faster than he was at putting it back together, a few evenings at a shooting range on base, kissing in the park on the way home, shadowy hands underneath her, lifting her, entering her, his breath heavy on her neck) and pauses.

She doesn’t allow herself time to think, or to mourn. There would be time for that later. She ignored the guilt roiling in her stomach (“you never really wanted them and now they’re gone and you have to fix it fix it fix everything you ruined don’t cry you child you don’t deserve to cry you should have been the one who got the bullet you you you”).

There was only one mission: Shaun. There was only one place to go: Diamond City.

She left Codsworth behind to start trying to put their home back together into something livable. She wasn’t sure she wanted company and he seemed more than eager to be put to task.

A few weeks later he’d be pleasantly surprised by the arrival of a group of rag-tag settlers and their leader: a man in a large leather hat with a too-kind smile and the name Preston Garvey. They told the robot that “the General took down a deathclaw with a minigun and saved all their lives, then told us to come back here for a relatively safe place to start rebuilding.”

Codsworth was surprised to find that he was, in fact, not surprised at all. He didn’t even bother to ask how she earned the title of General.

-

The dog had been following her for a full mile before she noticed him. When she turned and tensed, unsure of how to act in the face of a seemingly threatless creature in a surprisingly deceiving landscape, the shepherd padded forward slowly and pressed his cool, damp nose to the back of her hand. 

Something shifted inside her at that moment. She slid to her knees, sliding her arms around his neck, pressing her face into his coffee-colored fur, and she cried. She cried long, and hard. The dog didn’t move, sitting steadfast, supporting her weight.

She howled. The dog howled in return. An unbreakable friendship was forged in the dusty sunset of Boston’s lumbering wilderness.

-

“Dogmeat, I think… I think that we may have taken a wrong turn somewhere. This is definitely not Diamond City.”

The woman stood under the soft pink glow of a neon sign. Letters spelling GOODNEIGHBOR cast strange fingers of light across her face. Any onlookers would think she looked slightly inhuman, the planes of her high cheekbones lambent with shades of rose, fuchsia. This woman was not the same woman who exited the Vault three months prior and collapsed to her knees, blinded by the horizon of a new world. 

This woman was taut muscle, dirt streaking her cheeks, her eyes a hard glint as she scowled out from under her bangs. This woman had killed a man, many men, in the name of justice. In the name of defending the defenseless. In the name of finding a warm bed during a downpour. She was no longer the frustrated housewife, the ex-lawyer, the wilted flower. She was a force to be reckoned with. She was a whirlwind through the streets of downtown Boston. She was whispered about in raider holes and market squares alike. She was the Vault Dweller, the wanderer, the sole survivor.

Her name was Yoshimi, and she definitely took a wrong turn somewhere.


	3. a meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first meeting, the agreement, and the start of something.

“You’re the first ghoul I’ve met who hasn’t tried to kill me.”

Yoshimi peaked an eyebrow at the tricorn-adorned man in front of her as he popped a hip to one side and grinned at her, wiping blood nonchalantly off of a blade onto his dusty crimson jacket.

She spoke again before he had a chance to respond, “Was it really necessary to stab him… I mean, I obviously wasn’t falling for it.”

The ghoul finally spoke, his amusement with her attitude oozing from every syllable, “Ah, sweetheart, I wasn’t going to take any chances. Welcome to Goodneighbor!” His laugh rang high and loud as he waggled the knife in the air. “So, whatcha doin’ here? I take a vested interest in all newcomers as the mayor of this here city, the Commonwealth’s glorious asshole, our darling little home for the unwanted, unloved, unappreciated, unwhatevered.” He tittered again.

 _Is he drunk or something?_ Yoshimi didn’t know what to make of him, folding her armored arms over her chest and narrowing her eyes. “I’m looking to hire someone to accompany me to Diamond City. I got kind of… lost.” She looked down, absentmindedly chewing at the corner of her bottom lip, brow furrowing further.

“You’re gonna give yourself a headache if you scowl any harder, sister. I’m Hancock and I’ve got all the answers you need.” In one over-the-top gesture, he spun on his heel, pulled his hat from his head and, clutched in his hand, used it to point toward an alley stretching out behind them. “That way. First ya go straight, then ya go left, then ya go left. The Third Rail. There’s a merc in there that’ll do you just fine. He’s kind of a shit, but what merc isn’t? Ask for MacCready.” Giggle, giggle, giggle.

He started walking away from her, pausing a few steps away to look over her shoulder, “Come by my place next time you’re in town, beautiful. I think I could use someone like you around here.” He winked and placed his hat back on his head, swinging his hips as he walked down the alley and out of her sight.

“Did you expect him to just disappear into thin air after saying ‘We’re all mad here’ or was it just me?” She mumbled to Dogmeat, silently sitting at her side. The dog whimpered in commiseration and she scratched him behind the ears, allowing herself a tired smile. 

“Let’s go hire us a merc, buddy.”

-

The bar was stylish in the way a garbage heap was stylish. It was dimly lit and uninviting – not one of the patrons bothered to acknowledge Yoshimi and Dogmeat as they sidled their way toward the bar. They were greeted by a Mr. Handy in a bowler hat, bobbing behind the bar. “Wot?” He grumbled in their direction before Yoshimi even had a chance to open her mouth.

“I… uh…” She stifled a laugh at his over-the-top cockney accent.

“Wot d’ yeh want? I oin’t got en’ time fohr shite so spit i’ ou’ or git.”

“I…snrk… I… I’m looking for a merc. Mac… hehehe… Cready?” 

The robot let out an over-exaggerated sound of irritated disgust before pointing with one of his pincers toward a back room and turning away from her to systematically wipe glasses with a rag. Yoshimi briefly considered letting him know that no amount of polishing would get the grime of the Commonwealth off, but she didn’t want him to pop a gasket. She looked over toward the backroom, then down at Dogmeat, “Ready, buddy?” The dog bobbed his head in affirmation and the two of them made their way to where they’d meet their merc.

-

MacCready only let his eyes slip from Winlock and Barnes for a second and a second was all it took. _Fuck,_ he thought. _Fuck, I’m not supposed to swear. Fuck! At least I’m not saying it out loud. Fuck. She’s fuckin’ pretty. Focus, Robert._

Yoshimi slid past and lowered herself into a straight-backed chair on the opposite side of the room silently, Dogmeat settling himself at her feet. Two surprisingly tall men loomed in front of the hawkish mercenary, threatening him about one thing or another as he made an exaggerated effort to seem unaffected, sipping from a half-empty bottle of whiskey. She studied him quietly, not paying particular attention to the words that were being said, instead focusing on how they were being said.

He was nervous, reserved, cocky, tense. He enunciated his words precisely but stumbled over profanity – an effort to speak properly? That was peculiar. Yoshimi ran through a mental checklist of physical characteristics – if he was to be someone she worked with, she had to know him on sight. High cheek bones, sharp, angular nose, thick dark hair. Curly? Too short to tell. He had a weird way of keeping his mouth almost closed as he spoke, she noted, idly wondering if he had insecurities about his teeth. Scrawny, but who wasn’t in the wasteland? Thick leather boots, size 10, 11. In need of a shower, maybe two. Eyes: blue, so blue, blue like Nate’s, bluer than Nate’s, blue like an electric lightning storm, blue like springtime grape hyacinths, blue like Washington’s coat, blue like the wasteland sky swallowing her whole, blue, staring, staring, staring… staring at her…

“Welcome back to Earth, Miss Spacemerica. What can I do for you?”

The mercenary, MacCready, was leaning back in his chair, one arm slung over the side lazily, the other bent, leaning on one knee, cradling a lit cigarette between two stretched fingers. He seemed noticeably more relaxed than he had been when talking to the strange men as he looked her over at her, smiling smugly.The others had apparently left while she was lost in thought.

Yoshimi started, a dark blush highlighted the tips of her cheekbones and creeping back along her face toward the tips of ears. Dogmeat snored at her feet, unavailable as backup as she sat, broiling with embarrassment. She stood up promptly and stepped over the snoring dog toward the mercenary, stopping short, arms straight at her side, a few steps away from him. She sighed, reaching up to rub two fingers against her temple, “I take it you’re MacCready?”

“Last I checked.”

“I’m looking to hire you. The gho-uh, Hancock, he told me you were here. I’m looking for someone to guide me back to Diamond City and possibly take on a few odd jobs along the way.”

“250 caps. No negotiations.” He muttered, looking her up and down with forced disinterest. He settled the cigarette he was holding between his lips, inhaling slowly before forcing his biggest grin up at her as the smoke edged out of the corners of his mouth. 

She didn’t break, didn’t smile back, instead knitting her brows together as she countered, “There’s always room for negotiations. 200 caps.”

R.J. MacCready was a lot of things. He was a lush, a delinquent, a mercenary, a liar, a sharpshooter, an unabashed lover of comic books and former mayor of an underground child city. One thing he wasn’t was an idiot. Even if the 50 extra caps could help his cause, he knew deep in his gut, for some unmistakable, impossible to understand reason, he couldn’t let her pass out of his life at that moment without getting to know what it was about her that made her so… so…

“208 caps.” She mumbled, haggling with herself, cutting into his thoughts before he even had a chance to reply to her previous offer.

“Huh?” 

“Eight is my lucky number. 208 caps, take it or leave it.” 

“You’ve hired yourself an escort, miss…” He trailed off, realizing he didn’t know her name. At that point all he knew about her was that she stood five foot one, maybe five foot two, in an insulated vault suit, a permanent scowl painted on her face. Dark hair with straight across bangs tangled into a bun at the base of her neck. Shoulders straight, too straight, the straightness of someone purposefully and pointedly trying to push against a heavy weight. He knew that feeling, he knew that feeling all too well.

“Yoshimi. You can call me Yoshimi.”

“How about I call you boss and you call me MacCready. You can also call me willing to share a drink.” He reached behind him to pick up his previously abandoned bottle of whiskey, cigarette still hanging from his mouth as he spoke. When he turned back to her, raising an eyebrow and the bottle quizzically, she refused. “I don’t drink.” She spoke tersely, punctuating her sentence with a bag of caps sitting in her raised, open palm, for him to take.

“Da-darn, boss, are you always this charming?” He took the bag, not counting it’s contents before storing it in the pocket of his tattered duster.

“Just about.” She allowed herself a small smile in his direction before sighing again, looking over to Dogmeat as he stirred to waking, releasing a quick bark in affirmation of her comment.

“We’re leaving first thing in the morning for a quick job at the Boston Public Library before making our way to Diamond City. The dog and I are getting a room at the Rexford and you’re welcome to join us.”

MacCready swallowed a joke about her letting him in her bedroom so soon before reaching down to sling his rifle over one shoulder, his pack over the other. She was going to be a hard nut to crack, this one, he thought, if he even worked with her long enough for that to be an issue. The caps were good and the view was even better, so he didn’t mind either way.

“After you, boss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on playlists that go with the mood, emotional state, etc. of Mac and Yosh in this story as I write it - let me know if you're interested in me sharing those and I'd be happy to.


	4. the first job

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yoshimi and MacCready scope out Boston Public Library. Dogmeat gets ready to eat bad guys.

There was a brief moment in the morning, just as he woke, where MacCready wasn’t quite sure where he was. A miniature panic in his gut, the sensation of falling from an impossible height, caused him to snap up from his bedroll and send his hat flying from his head onto the floor in front of him. His chest heaved once, twice, as his eyes adjusted to the pale morning light through the window and the way it highlighted a slender, stoic woman as she rose from her perch on the end of a twin bed to his right, striding over to his hat to pick it up. She studied it a moment, running a thumb slowly over the brim, tilting it to eye the bullets tucked into it’s band before looking over her shoulder at him, eyes dark and ringed with the purple-grey of sleeplessness, “What’s up with the bullets? Why would someone who shoots things for a living save something like that?”

He blinked, dumbfounded. _Who was sh-oh yeah, he took a job last night when he was a little too drunk to negotiate properly and then proceeded followed her here like a love-struck puppy, passing out on the floor before they could as much as discuss armament. Smooth, MacCready._

She stared at him, patient. Eerily patient, even. “I, uh…” He reached up to run his fingers through the thick brown mop atop his head, flattened by the constant present of his hat. The hat she was holding as she waited for his answer. “Well…” It’s not like he could tell her, or anyone, the truth, but he wasn’t the greatest liar. “I just… think… it makes me look cool?” He shrugs, offering her a tight-lipped smirk, trying his best to look bashful.

“You’re weird, MacCready.” Yoshimi frowned. It wasn’t an unkind frown, though. It spoke more to friendly bemusement than irritation. She looked down at the hat one more time before tossing it lightly into his lap. “Meet me at Daisy’s in an hour. We’ve got the room here until then, too, so you don’t have to rush to get up. I’ve just got a few things to do before we head out.” Without another word, she slung her pack onto her shoulder and left the room, the dog once again quiet at her heels.

Without realizing he had been holding it the whole time she was speaking, MacCready let out a long, deep breath. He laid back down flat on his bedroll and ran his palm over his face, groaning.

“She’s chillier than Grognak’s balls in issue nine.” He mumbled to himself, rising from the bedroll. “I mean, minus the actual snows of lust, so…” He continued rambling to the empty room as he folded and stuffed his roll into his pack, sitting on the bed to tighten the laces on his boots and clean his rifle. He didn’t even notice the box until he had sat on it, right at the edge of the mattress – Gum Drops. 

Huh… maybe she’s not that bad after all. He opened the container, palming a neon yellow gummy, rolling it down his hand to hold it between his thumb and pointer finger, raising it in front of his left eye and squinting his right closed to get a better look. _Lemon, sugary sweet, Lucy’s favorite flavor, favorite color._

He popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly as he considered Yoshimi’s earlier question about his hat.

_There’s no way I could have told her that one bullet is for the ghoul that killed my wife and the other is for myself if I don’t get my son the cure he needs in time._

He allowed himself a beat, a single moment of intense sadness bubbling like bile in the back of his throat, before swallowing hard, slamming both palms down onto his knees, tucking the mostly full box of candy into the pocket of his duster, and proclaiming to no one in particular: “Time to go shoot things for a living!”

-

He had been sitting outside Daisy’s for seven minutes before she walked by. She gave him a sidelong glance followed by a quick nod before ducking into the shop to speak with the familiar ghoulish shopkeeper. He had eaten six more gum drops, his initial desire to savor them side-stepped by his lackluster impulse control. “Only three left,” he sighed aloud to himself as he arched his spine against the back of the wooden bench, closing his eyes and groaning with pleasure at the sharp pops he felt along his vertebrae as he stretched backward.

“Three what?” His eyes snapped open and were met with the straight-faced visage of his employer.

“Uh.. gum drops.. uh, thanks for those, unless they weren’t meant for me, then in that case, sorry, but I’ve already eaten most of them, but you can have the rest, there’s one of the blue ones left and the blue ones are the best flavor, so…”

“Relax, MacCready. I left ‘em for you. Here.” Yoshimi handed him a small container of .308 rounds. “Consider the ammo a perk of the job. Free of charge. Except, I was hoping you’d use that ammo to take down a few super mutants with me.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

MacCready briefly wondered if all of her smiles were forced.  
Yoshimi briefly wondered if he knew most of her smiles were forced.

“Most people in the wastes aren’t this generous.” He took the ammo from her and stood up as he tucked it away in his pack, taking a pause to feel a strange masculine pleasure at being a few inches taller than she was, something he wasn’t particularly used to. 

“Huh?” She was already halfway to Goodneighbor’s front gate by the time he looked up from his pack, tossing a look over her shoulder at him.

“Ah, nothin’ boss.”  
“Okay, let’s head out.”

She turned away and continued walking. He couldn’t help but admire her bottom in the Vault Suit for one weak, pathetic second ( _come on, Robert, for God’s sake, be professional_ ) before he noticed the dog, standing still, a foot or so behind her, just watching him, judging. MacCready shrugged and grinned at him unabashedly, leaning down to pick up his rifle and sling it over his shoulder, stepping forward to follow dog and owner out into the wild wastes.

-

Three blocks away from Goodneighbor, Yoshimi stopped in her tracks so suddenly that MacCready couldn’t help but run into her. Her abruptness put him on alert and his rifle was shouldered within a beat. She turned and reached up to push the barrel down, signaling that she hadn’t stopped for danger, a strange look contorting the fine features of her face into something less strong angular, more unsure, more quizzical. Her eyes searched his face quickly before glancing behind, beyond him – he assumed to check windows and corners for potential threats. They never quite returned to his face, instead searching the ground, her palms, feet, gravel.

“Hey, I just… uh, I wanted to apologize?” Her voice went high at the last word, awkward, unsure of how to communicate how she was feeling. Yoshimi lifted her right foot behind her, tapping her toe on the ground (a pre-war habit) a few times as she stretched the silence, always the “think before you speak” type. “I’ve been traveling with nothing but a dog for the last month and a half, and before that my companion was the type to just keep talking regardless of whether you were listening or not.”

MacCready watched her struggle to find the words, swallowing his own amusement at her sudden shyness for fear of pushing her back into her “cool, collected, unphased” visage. He absentmindedly fiddled with the box of gum drops in his pocket.

“What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry if I come across as cold or unapproachable. I’m just not very good at, uh, talking…” She trailed off, eyes focusing on everything around them except for his face. “I just want you to know that you are more than welcome to ask me for whatever you might need as we travel together. You know, like if you have to pee, or whatever, don’t just hold it…” Blushing. She was blushing now. Hard, red, as if she had just been simultaneously slapped on both cheeks.

MacCready was near to bursting with swallowed laughter. His fists were clenched in his pockets, the pocket of gum drops crushed in one white-knuckled hand. _Who is this chick? Is she even real? I can’t… I can’t… oh god…_ The second he let a slow, restrained chuckle at her expense out he saw her brows knit together the tiniest bit and he wished he could swallow it back up, but it was too late. “Ahhhh… don’t be mad, okay?” He smiled, actually kind of appreciative for the way she… cared, even if it was in a peculiar, self-conscious sort of way. “I’m only laughing because people don’t talk like that. You hired me. You paid me. You don’t have to worry about me at all. You don’t even have to talk to me.” He couldn’t help but start to laugh again, this time a little airier, a little more honest.

Yoshimi was mortified at what seemed to be another social faux-pas to add to her list of “things that you don’t do after the apocalypse,” but his laughter seemed so good-natured… She turned away from him, willing the redness on her cheeks to go away, irritated at herself for even letting her demeanor switch to anything but 100% calm and collected. _The burden of living for the most part in one's own head,_ she thought, _is all the stupid places you end up getting lost._

“Hey, wait, wait.” He reached for her elbow to turn her back towards him and she tensed at his touch, ever so slightly. Just the tiniest whisper of discomfort and he stepped back, apologizing again. “Wait. I appreciate it. Just because people don’t talk like that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, y’know?”

“Sure.” She sighed. MacCready felt the slightest pang of disappointment at the sound of her voice, the way it rolled from her mouth like a snow drift. She had shifted, right in front of him – from fresh and slightly vulnerable back to the woman he met the night previous – cold as ice. 

“Would this be a good time to tell you that I really hafta take a leak?”

His disappointment was replaced by a slight twinge of something foreign as he heard her giggle, then, surprised by her own laughter, giggle just a little bit more. It felt kind of warm in his rib cage, like the sweet aftertaste of peppermint, the orange glow of honey whiskey, or the warmth of a hand, small, feeling around inside his chest.

-

It wasn’t long before they were lurking in an alley across from the front entrance to the library, scoping out the empty space in front. They hadn’t met any threats on their way over save for a few raiders throwing pot shots from a high rise that MacCready took out without so much as a huff. (Afterwards he asked Yoshimi if she was impressed, she wouldn’t give up anything other than a shrug and a slight raise of her eyebrows. For someone who didn’t know him that well, she sure had a knack for doing exactly what needed to be done to motivate him. Jerk.)

“Okay.” Her voice was a low, a whisper, not taking any chances in case there were any mutants patrolling in nearby alleys. “Daisy asked us to clear out the Super Mutants camping in the library in the name of nostalgia. She also asked me to return a book for her, though I’m not sure we have enough caps to pay the late fee.” She chuckled quietly at her own joke as MacCready rolled his eyes.

“And you’ve been telling me that I have a horrible sense of humor? Seriously?”  
“Focus, MacCready." Another chuckle. "Here’s the deal. We’ll go in quiet. I’m hoping the intercom out front can be used to somehow get us in without any windows having to be broken. There’s a small front room with computers and return terminals and then there’s a big, open, main room. I’m assuming the most opposition will be there. You can set up with your rifle in that front area to pick off anyone you see looking over from upper floors and Dogmeat and I will go in to handle them up close while you cover us.”

“Up… close? Super mutants? Boss, no offense, but do you have any idea what the hell you’re talking about? Also, hey, wait, how do you know all this? Have you been here before?” The way she described the library to him sounded intimate and as far as he knew, no one had dared go in there in a long time, because, you know, the whole place was a super mutant shitting ground. 

“Y-… no, no, I found a map. Look, it doesn’t matter. I know what I’m doing, what I need to know is if you know what you’re doing.” She was getting impatient, he could tell with the way she kept fiddling with the handle of the combat knife she had unsheathed from the back of her belt. Dogmeat’s tail was beating against his calf – even the dog was rarin’ to go.

“Fu-fine, yeah, let’s go. Coast is clear, anyways.” He nudged his rifle off his shoulder and symbolically pointed it up at the buildings around them to signify that he had scoped them out.

“MacCready?”  
“Yeah?”  
“You help get us out of this alive and then I’ll be impressed.”


	5. inside the library

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> See Yoshimi fight. See Dogmeat dog. See a friendship start to form.

_Shen Shu watched the young girl center herself. She raised her palms outward in front of her, lowering them, then bringing them up in front of her once more in smooth, fluid motion. She twisted her wrists as her hands moved, as if she was sliding them along the outside of a globe, arcing to her left, then her right. In her next quick movement, she dipped low, swinging her left arm down, palm still out, and straightening her left leg out in front of her before rising again._

_She stopped abruptly, her leg snapping back and her feet squaring in stiff protest – her demeanor no longer serene, no longer tranquil. The adolescent turned on her heel and pushed her lip out in a pronounced pout, “Dad! I can’t focus with you staring at me!”_

_“Yoshimi, t’ai chi chu’an is about fluidity of motion. Master your breathing, master your focus, master your form.”  
“It’s impossible to focus with you standing over there. I can hear you snicker every time I mess up.”_

_“Then stop messing up, little bird.” Shen dropped his arms from their position folded over his chest and smiled warmly at his daughter. He stepped forward from the kitchen entryway to the shaded concrete of their family’s outdoor carport, squaring his feet as he stopped next to her. He looked over, dull copper eyes like a lucky penny meeting her own, similar in shade but with a hint of shimmering gold. They shared a knowing smile, his given freely, hers given with the stubborn reluctance only a pre-teen could muster._

_“Sǐ mǎ dāng huó mǎ yī, xiǎo niǎo.” He spoke softly, slowly raising his arms in front of him. She sighed, smiling, pulling a deep breath in and letting her body relax as she followed suit._

_“I know, dad, I know. Nothing is impossible.”_

-

“This is fu-…flipping impossible!”

The shit hit the proverbial fan the second they had entered the front entryway of the library. Thanks to a small bit of luck, Yoshimi was able to convince the robotic voice on the other end of the intercom that she was an employee coming into work – they were let in without having to pick any locks. 

They were also let in to a crowd of Super Mutants who had listened to her entire conversation with the protectron, wielding their boards and cudgels as they eagerly awaited their prey. Super Mutants weren’t patient. Bullets and blows began flying immediately.

As did Yoshimi.

MacCready would have stood there, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, as she moved through the crowd of enemies with the movements of someone doing a completely foreign, intricate dance. He would have, but a board to the hip and a screaming mutant didn’t give him much time for staring. The first one on him took his rifle butt to the face, staggering backwards enough for him to shoulder the rifle and pop off a couple shots into it’s head. With the help of Dogmeat’s surprisingly agile “bite and pull” maneuvers, he cleared the three lumbering mutants in the front entry out pretty quickly so he was able to stick to their plan and set up his rifle to take out anyone with high ground.

He adjusted his sights and swept gaps in the walls of the crumbling top floor for the sight of any more enemies. One shot, two. Another fell. He swept his scope down and caught her in his sights again.

She fought unlike anyone he had ever seen before. He didn’t have enough martial arts knowledge to know if what she was doing was incredibly stupid or incredibly amazing, but he couldn’t deny there was a certain… _something_ to it. In her left hand was clutched a modded combat knife, one of two she kept sheathed in an x on the back of her belt. It was a little sharper, a little longer, than a traditional combat knife – but, he noted as she sliced the tendon on the leg of a mutant to cripple it as he put a bullet in it’s head to take it down – it definitely did the work. In her right hand was a 10 mm pistol with a silencer on the end. It packed a serious punch, so he assumed it also contained some mods he wasn’t aware of. She shot without aiming, her arms moving in long arcs combined with swift, sudden movements of power followed by shots from the gun. It was impressive.

She whirled, twirled, kicked, slid, and spun her way through the enemies, simultaneously popping off shots and slicing ribbons of blood through the air. At one point she did an aerial cartwheel that was so.. so.. so _amazingly cool_ that she caused his grip to slip and a shot that was meant to take a mutant’s brain took its shoulder instead. Before he even had a chance to refocus she had covered for him, vaulting herself off of the mutant’s knee over it’s head to swiftly slide her knife into the delicate flesh where jaw met neck, pulling it out to land with a soft thud, completely nonplussed.

Between MacCready’s aim, Yoshimi’s dance, and Dogmeat’s teeth, the library was completely clear within fifteen minutes.

He watched as she stood, completely still, in the center of the library’s main room, her shoulders bobbing gently from the intensity of her breaths. He could feel the crackle of tension in the air, and decided against saying anything or approaching her quite yet.

Instead, he pushed himself up and pulled out a rag to wipe his rifle down, whistling low to call Dogmeat to his side and feeling the smallest glow of pride as the dog meandered over so he could praise him, scratching him behind the ears roughly and cooing. “Who’s a good boy, huh? Who bit out more super mutant throats than any other doggie ever, huh? Youuuuu.” Dogmeat yipped happily, his tail wagging in tune with his contented panting.

MacCready lowered his voice conspiratorially, “Hey buddy, she okay over there?” The dog tilted his head and MacCready could have swore he saw him shrug his shoulders noncommittally, but dogs weren’t that smart – right? _Right?_

Yoshimi could feel their eyes on her. MacCready and Dogmeat. Her companions. She stood rooted and still in the center of the carnage like a paragon of bloodletting, breathing hard and fast. The smell… the smell of copper pervaded the room and it made her stomach roil, her eyes burn. She knew that she needed to turn and face them, give them the ok, tell them what to do next. _You’re the boss, after all._ At that moment, though, she couldn’t. She felt frozen in the face of death. She felt like she was going to throw up. She felt like living each day in this place, with all this fucking blood everywhere, that she’d never survive, that it was impossible.

_Sǐ mǎ dāng huó mǎ yī._

She could hear his voice float through her mind like petals on the wind, swirling and combining in her memory with the soft smell of jasmine and charcoal soap. She sucked in a deep breath and summoned her father’s face in her minds eye, tensing and releasing each of her muscles in tune with her training before a satisfyingly long exhale. _Master your breathing, little bird, or you never know what sort of irradiated creature will lob your head off with a bit of wood._ She wondered briefly if the way she remembered his voice was accurate – it had been so long – did she edit him to make him better than he had been?

“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” She said to herself, wiping her knife on the leg of her vault suit before tucking it back in it’s sheath.

At that point MacCready couldn’t hold onto his patience for much longer, getting antsy with the silence pervading every corner of the huge building, “Hey boss, you ok?”

 _Actually… actually, I am._ “Yeah, sorry… hey, MacCready?”

Yoshimi turned to face him, loose strands of hair from her bun falling long and framing her face (one streak of blood angled parallel with the cut of her right cheekbone, smudge of oil along her jaw, cheeks glowing from physical activity’s increased blood flow) like some sort of battle maiden from one of his comics, like a _god damn angel of death._

He couldn’t help but gape at her. “Yeah, boss?”

“That was good work. You can color me impressed.” She smiled, and it reached all the way up to her eyes. They crinkled at the corners, folded like slips of fortune paper. 

“Yes, well, I _aim_ to please.” He waggled his eyebrows dramatically.

That time they laughed together. Even the dog, in his own doggy way.

-

Three hours later they were crouched in the back room of the library next to a pile of scrap and a hot plate with a pan of full sizzling radstag teasing their empty stomachs as it took it’s time to cook. Two bottles of purified water sat open next to them as they sat cross-legged on the murky floor. Night had fallen, the only light in the room was an abandoned lantern with just enough oil to last them through until morning. Dogmeat snored, the occasional low whine escaping his maw as he dreamed, curled against Yoshimi’s left hip as she oiled the blade of her knife quietly.

MacCready kept one eye on her and the other on the meat, his stomach a tight knot of excitement at the prospect of a decent meal (When she pulled it out of her pack he was hesitant to ask if she was going to share, but asked anyways, that _endlessly flapping mouth of his_ – she seemed almost offended at the idea that she’d eat without offering him any. Weird, weird woman). The doors were barricaded and the library’s friendly robot guards (“Ah, yes miss, feel free to use the break room to cook your dinner. It’s been a long shift!”) lingered in the main room. 

There was a quiet moment of peace. No awkward silence, and only the slightest concern that a hoard of monsters would bust through the roof at any moment.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” He broke the lull in speech, tugging his hat off of his head into his lap and fiddling with it as he looked down at the cooking meat.

“Hm?” Yoshimi’s voice sounded serene, almost sleepy in her response.

“What the he-heck was that? The way you fought? No one fights like that, it’s… it’s…”

“It’s a form of martial artistry that my father taught me, a long time ago.”

“Most people don’t have time for that sort of thing these days. Focusin’ on staying alive through bullets and grenades, not… punch-dancing, or whatever that was.”

“When I say a long time ago, I mean, a _long_ time ago…” She trailed off momentarily to take the pan of radstag off of the hot plate, sliding one steak onto a semi-clean plate they had fished out of the cupboards and sliding the other onto it’s twin.

“It’s kind of a long story, and I’m not sure you need to know all of it.” She continued.  
“Yeh’ ca’ te’ me whuh’ ev’ y’ wan’.” MacCready hadn’t bothered to wait for the meat to cool before stuffing a huge bite into his mouth.

She laughed, low and slow, sad and cool, her usual. And, for some reason she couldn’t quite place, she told him her story, or at least, the story that brought her to that library, at that night, with him, in the soft glow of the lantern light. The story that started at the vault and ended with dried blood under her fingernails. _That_ story.

She only had to tell it three more times with varying degree of detail before he actually believed her.

-

When they fell asleep that night, on separate bedrolls, deciding to take the luxury of their robot bodyguards to skip watch duty, there was a sense of calm, a sense of camaraderie.

It was something neither one of them had felt in a long time, and it was something they both found themselves welcoming, a thin red string of connection weaving it’s way through the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sǐ mǎ dāng huó mǎ yī" translates directly to something along the lines of "save the dead horse as though he is still alive", but it means, in the more broad sense, "anything is possible, nothing is impossible." 
> 
> _The horse could always still be alive._


	6. conversations on the road, vol. I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In-between chapter highlighting conversations between Yoshimi and MacCready as they travel together. There will be more than one chapter like this. Enjoy~

“MacCready, what are you humming?”  
“Sixty Minute Man. They play it on DCR all the time. It’s a song about… uh… well… stuff.”  
“Huh?”  
“Don’t worry about it.”

-

“I’ve never heard the name Yoshimi before. Is there a story behind it?”  
“My father chose the name because it’s Japanese. He thought people would assume I was Japanese instead of Chinese and maybe give me some slack. He said it was a name he heard in a song his great-grandfather used to sing to himself a lot.”  
“Have you ever heard the song?”  
“No.”  
“That’s too bad.”  
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

-

“MacCready sounds like a last name.”  
“Probably because it is a last name.”  
“Ugh.”  
“Okay, boss, want to know my first name?”  
_Exasperated silence._  
“It’s Robert. Robert Joseph MacCready, at your service.”

-

“Hey Dogmeat, tell your mama that you want a big juicy mirelurk steak for dinner. Go on, tell her!”  
_Dogmeat yips happily._  
“It’s not going to work, MacCready. We’ve got work to do. Work which does not involve digging through sewers for gross mutated crabs.”  
“But I-“  
“Nope.”  
_Dogmeat whines._  
“I’m going to feed both of you to the first mirelurk I see, so help me god.”

-

“You know; you look pretty good for being over 200 years old. I mean, compared to the only 200 plus year old I know, you look downright excellent.”  
“The only other 200 plus year old person you know doesn’t have a nose. Or an outer layer of skin. Or ears. Because she’s a ghoul.”  
“Yeah, well, I’m just sayin’, boss.”

-

“When we were at the library last week, I saw you had packed up a few books with you.”  
“Yeah, I did.”  
“How come?”  
“It’s the end of civilization, not the end of the world. There’s always a place for good books, or at least the few left that haven’t been burnt to shit.”  
“Uh… do you think, maybe, I could look at them, later? Maybe borrow one?”  
“You can borrow all of them, MacCready.”

-

“YOU… YOU JUST… YOU JUST KICKED THE HEAD OFF OF A RAIDER. KICKED IT! RIGHT! OFF!”  
“Shut _UP_ , MacCready, or you’ll lead the rest of them over here. Plus, the head was mostly severed by that wayward 50 cal, so it would have fallen off anyways.”  
“KICKED IT!”

-

“I’m tired.”  
“Hi tired, I’m Robert.”  
“I can’t believe I paid you actual money to travel with me.”  
“Hi, I can’t believe I-“ _Thwack._

-

“Can I ask you something?”  
“At this point I’m fairly certain you’d ask whether I told you it was ok or not.”  
“For once, I’m being serious.”  
“Okay, sure, what’s up?”  
“Why are you going to Diamond City.”  
“Honestly, I’ve been there before already… and I probably could have gotten back without help, but when I stumbled upon Goodneighbor I thought it might be nice to have some company for the trip back. I wasn’t that lost.”  
“You, uh, didn’t answer my question there.”  
“Ha, yeah… well, I’ve got a friend there that I need to talk to. About finding my son. About what I should do next, I guess.”  
“Huh.”  
“Yeah.”  
_Extended period of silence._  
“You _were_ pretty lost, though.”  
“Shut up, MacCready.”

-

“Are you all alone out here?”  
“Uh, well… kind of… it’s… it’s uh, it’s a …”  
“It’s okay, MacCready. We’ve all got our secrets.”  
“Yeah, I guess so.”

-

“You have GOT to teach me your swishy-magic-knife-kicky-punchy-dance.”  
“That is _definitely_ not what it’s called.”  
“But still-“  
“I practiced for close to 20 years before I went into the Vault, and my father for 40 before me. It’s not something you can just learn overnight.”  
“Ah.” _Sad sigh._  
“But, if you want… I mean, you can join me when I practice my form in the mornings. I know you watch, but I could slow it down. We could practice together. Dogmeat can keep watch.”  
_Dogmeat barks happily._

-

“Hey, Yoshimi. How did you learn to pick locks like that?”  
“I… uh, honestly, I’m not sure. I just kind of figured it out once I realized it’d be necessary out here.”  
“Is there anything you aren’t good at?”  
“Hm… Yeah. I mean, I’m not good at being bad at things. Things like cooking and bathing, like someone I know…”  
“I burn some Blamco ONE time and never hear the end of it.”

-

“MacCready? …MacCready? Hey…? Robert!”  
“Huh, what, wait, what happened?”  
“We were attacked by ferals and you completely froze on me. If Dogmeat wasn’t here I could’ve been toast. What the hell is going on?”  
“I… I… fu-shoot, boss, I’m really sorry. I’m not sure. I…”  
“Hey, relax. Just, don’t let it happen again, okay?”  
“Never.” _Never in a million years. Never again._

-

“With the way you fight, there should be a comic made about you.”  
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”  
“Yes! Hm… The Amazing Yoshimi and the ABC’s of As… uh, Butt-kicking!”  
“No.”  
“Yoshimi the Magnificent and the Silver-Shroud Take on the Gloomifying Gorgonist!”  
“Oh my god.”  
“Yo-Yo Yoshimi and the Rolling String of Justice!”  
“Stop.”  
“Yawny Yoshimi and the Sleepytime Murder Plot!”  
“One more and I swear I’ll stab you.”

-

“Do you prefer going by MacCready, or Robert, or…?”  
“Huh? Well, uh, I don’t really care, boss.”  
“Really? Most people do. Then again, I guess I don’t.”  
“Is it okay if I call you Yo sometimes, then?”  
“Sure, RJ. I kinda like RJ. Has a nice ring to it.”  
_Blush._

-

“Do I REALLY need to carry half a dozen broken clipboards, three chipped coffee mugs, a million pencils, and FOUR WHOLE DESK FANS?”  
“I definitely haven’t given you a million pencils.”  
“That’s beside the point!”  
“Shush, that’s what you’re paid for. Besides, I need that stuff.”

-

“What was it like?”  
“Huh?”  
“Before the war.”  
“It was… cleaner, I guess. Violence was more contained. People weren’t as honest with themselves. You could go to a store to buy milk, or a cake, or eggs, or other things you don’t really find anymore. It wasn’t perfect, though. There was a lot… a lot of… hm, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, sorry. When you don’t have to struggle to just survive there’s a lot of room for unkindness to fill in at the corners.”  
“Cake?”

-

“Welcome back to Diamond City!”  
“Hey MacCready, can I ask you something?”  
“Normally I’m the one saying that to you. What’s up?”  
“Do you have… any plans? Any jobs lined up after this?”  
“Nope, why?”  
“Do you want to maybe stay with me a little longer? I can pay you more once we get back to Sanctuary. I know that’s not exactly fair, but I think I’ve proven myself to be true to my word.”  
“Y-yeah… hey, actually, I was going to ask you something myself.”

-

The front entrance to Diamond City was empty save for the lazy, lilting patrolmen with their rifles and their heads full of wasteland stories. It had taken Yoshimi and MacCready two weeks to get there when it should have taken a few days at most, but in a world torn asunder it wasn’t too hard to get sidetracked. 

They stood a few feet apart, awkwardly shuffling around the ideas of “well, the jobs over,” and “for some reason neither one of us really wants to leave,” both red-faced and irritated with themselves for not communicating quite as well as they would have liked.

“Yeah, so… like I said, I wanted to ask you something.” MacCready pulled his hat off of his head again, a nervous tick, his right hand combing through his thick chestnut hair before resting, palm flat, on the back of his neck. “You remember those guys? The ones that were there when you came into the Third Rail to hire me? The big ones?”

“Yeah, I remember them.” Yoshimi watched him, feeling the slightest pique of interest as he spoke despite her best efforts at disinterested coolness. Something was going on, something he hadn’t brought up to her during his endless rambling of the two previous weeks.

“Well, you see, okay, they’re after me because I joined the Gunners, and…”  
She cut him off, “The Gunners? We’ve killed a dozen of them on our way over here for throwing grenades at our heads and you were one of them and forgot to mention it?”

He sputtered, his hand falling from his back of his neck to his side, “No, no, listen. I was one of them, but I left. Or, at least, I tried to. I thought they’d be a good gang to run with to make the caps I need, but they were… they weren’t kind. I mean, I know mercs aren’t the hug-and-hold-hands type, but the stuff they were into was really dark. Too dark for me. It took me a little too long to realize it, but once I did, I left, only, they didn’t like that. So… I was planning to save up, and pay ‘em off, but the more I think about it, the more I think they’ll just take my money and shoot me for good measure, so…”

“Yes.”

“Huh?”

“Yes, I’ll help you blow them the hell up. If you haven’t noticed, I’m all about vengeance.”

“Y-yeah… Yosh, you know, I, uh…” He blushed again. _Jesus, Robert, what are you, a fuckin’ virgin on her wedding night? Get yourself together. You have words. Use them._ “Thank you. For, I dunno, for making me feel like you might actually care what happens to me.”

“I do care what happens to you, you idiot. Let’s go get this taken care of. Diamond City isn’t going anywhere.”


	7. mass pike interchange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takin' down the gunners like it ain't no thang. Feelings.

When they turned away from the gates of Diamond City to head southwest, Yoshimi found herself quickly slipping into quiet reverie. A part of her knew that this was just another way to avoid her problems, that she had killed Kellogg almost a month ago and still hadn’t returned to Valentine with the news because she was scared about what would happen next. Maybe not scared, just… _she hadn’t even given Kellogg a chance to speak, she just… lunged, while his guard was down, and put her knife… right through his throat, the sound, the bubbling, the gurgle, the hot spray on her face as his life suddenly became nothing more than a memory, a past tense prayer to the gods of deserved violence… she wasn’t sure who she was… who… after that… after…_

“Boss?”  
“Huh?”  
“You were, well… you were, uh…”

Yoshimi blinked, twice, hard, and realized she was two feet away from walking off a ledge to tumble a story down onto crumbled concrete.

“Oh, shit, sorry… wait, were you waiting to see how far I’d walk before I noticed?”  
“Dogmeat said I should have let you take the fall, but I’m a nice guy like that.”

-

They traveled quickly and quietly, not allowing themselves to be distracted by empty houses, potential loot, or the pull of warm settlements like on their initial journey. This time the goal was clear, and it was to be carried out swiftly so they could get back to Diamond City, and back to the problems Yoshimi had put on hold.

They crested a hill half a mile away from the Interchange and nestled into a small half circle of trees that blocked their approach from any prying eyes or missile launchers. Yoshimi hunched, knees bent, just behind MacCready as he laid on his stomach to steady his rifle and investigate the overpass through his scope. He kept one eye against the convex glass as he studied their opposition, speaking low to Yoshimi through the corner of his mouth, “There are a lot of them. I can’t see them all but I can see at least a dozen. One of them has a suit of power armor, and… aw, sh-shoot.”

“ _What?_ ” Yoshimi leaned forward to squint and attempt to make out what she could, placing a hand casually on MacCready’s calf to steady herself. He could feel the warmth of her fingers through the threadbare fabric, willing himself to not tense up. Casual touch from a woman like Yoshimi was rare, and like a butterfly upon landing, quick to disappear into the air. She asked again, a sigh involuntarily escaping MacCready’s lips as she lifted her hand, shifting her body to lay on her stomach next to him, nudging her shoulder against his, wordlessly asking to look through the scope. He angled it toward her, and when she drew in a sharp, surprised breath, he knew she saw what he had.

“Assaultron.” They spoke in unison.

“Well, we’re as good as fucked.” Yoshimi sighed and rolled onto her back, placing a palm over her face, pulling her knees up at 45 degree angles. “Hmm…”

MacCready followed suit, delicately laying his rifle against his side and rolling over onto his own back (Dogmeat had been snoozing against the trunk of one of their protective trees, true to the nature of the wasteland, the dog was usually either napping or fighting), interlocking his fingers and bringing his hands up behind his head to support it.

“We’ll have to sneak up somehow. Maybe disguises? If we can take the people on the ground out without notifying the people up top, we can use the elevator without arousing suspicion. I could just… lob a grenade up there and hope we get the robot while you pick ‘em off from afar.” She illustrated her point by holding one arm straight in the air, making the shape of a gun with her hand, and softly mumbling _pew, pew, pew_.

“You’re not much of a strategist are you, boss?” MacCready tilted his head at her, smiling affectionately.

“No, not really. I can kick heads off of raiders, I shouldn’t have to create intricate plans.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

-

They spoke a while, from early afternoon until dusk was starting to settle, low and orange, around them. Their plan was simple enough: take out the Gunners on the ground using stealth, Yoshimi would pull one of their uniforms on and take the elevator up, quietly making her way toward the Commander’s cabin on the right after sending the elevator back down. MacCready would load the elevator with a pile of grenades, all connected together by some spare wire Yoshimi had scavved ( _“See, I told you all those alarm clocks we collected weren’t for nothing!”_ ), and blow it once it was up top. The explosion would be enough to take out the first row of defenses, the Assaultron, and the turret – or, at least, they hoped. After that he’d run back to find high ground, she’d quickly pull the fusion core from the back of the (currently unoccupied) power armor, and they’d fight like usual. Dogmeat was to stay with MacCready and watch his back as he did his shooting just in case some inconvenient bloatflies floated on by.

It was good enough for Yoshimi, but the whole plan made MacCready feel uneasy. There was so much that could go wrong. One person looks at her wrong, or the Assaultron doesn’t get blown up, and she’s trapped up there alone with a whole lot of fire raining down upon her. The thought made him queasy, but there was something to be said for her steadfast confidence. Confidence that allowed her to catch a few hours of peaceful sleep as he kept watch, both of them still laying on their backs on the hidden slope of the hill, surrounded by saplings and weedy bushes.

He couldn’t help but look at her: the slight arcs of shadow on her cheekbones from her impossibly long lashes, the way her entire demeanor changed when she actually relaxed, the soft caramel colored point of one ear poking out from her hair (mostly pulled out from her bun in her sleep), the slightest hint of freckles dotting down the side of her neck into the opening of her Vault Suit, the way her collarbone pressed against the blue fabric enough for him to see it, to be able to reach out and touch it… _Okay, easy tiger, she’s a beautiful woman, we get that, but she’s still the boss and you’re still a no-good mungo who doesn’t even deserve to think of her that way, let alone act on it. You’ve only known her for three weeks. It’s just been a long time and your stupid hormones are going out of whack because you’re nervous, that’s all._ MacCready pulled a deep breath in through his nose, leaning his head back flush against the grass and holding it as long as he could, counting stars as they appeared above, before pushing out a loud, forceful exhale. _There we go. A few more hours and we’ve got shootin’ and lootin' to do._

A few more hours passed and the darkness of night slipped around them like a welcoming cloak. Yoshimi rose from her nap, fixed her hair into a tight bun, and took ten minutes to run through all of her stretches. MacCready loaded his rifle, tightened his ammo belt, and delicately nestled their grenade trap into his pocket. Dogmeat let a low growl roll quietly from his throat. 

It was time.

-

Yoshimi ran, her body angled low to the ground, each foot fall almost soundless as she soared over the grass toward the first unsuspecting private. He was out with a quick snap of her silenced 10 mm to the base of his neck. He didn’t even hear her get up behind him. MacCready took out two more from his perch on their hill, one shot after another, the sound muffled by the distance. So far, so good. Another fell to her knife, yet another to his gun.

The bloodbath was fast, and quiet. The ground was clear. Now for the tricky part. He picked himself up from the slope and slung his rifle over his shoulder to join her below the overpass, sticking to the shaded protection of the trees. When MacCready reached her, she had already pulled on a pair of ripped corduroys and a red flannel over her vault suit, her hair tucked into a military helmet. They hunched behind a conifer adjacent to the elevator and exchanged hurried whispers.

“Do I look alright?”  
_Only you could look fuckin’ beautiful in the clothes of someone whose throat you just slit._ “You look fine, just watch out for that big hole in the knee. It’s dark so no one should see the suit, but still.”  
“Mm, yeah. Okay, it’s going to go fast after this. You ready?”  
_No._ “Yeah, boss, I’m ready.”  
“Let’s finish this, yeah?” She smiled, briefly, absent-mindedly, her thoughts obviously already racing ahead to what she’d be doing once she reached the top of the elevator. She nodded once, tersely, then turned to step into the light.

Impulsively, MacCready whispered after her, one fist, tense and white-knuckled, pressed against his hip, “Don’t… this isn’t worth it. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

She didn’t hear him. She was already on the elevator, and it was already time for him to get the grenades ready.

-

Yoshimi was an expert at swallowing her own feelings. She’d wrap them in paper, maybe even place a bow on top, then stow them away somewhere safe and sound to be dealt with later. Giftwrap for thoughts of her sons kidnapping, for guilt over not missing her husband that much. Confetti for Kellogg’s head as it rolled back on his spine. A ribbon to tie around the big fucking box of fear she felt in the pit of her stomach as she rode the elevator up. _A ribbon of blood, more like. Every time you’re impulsive, something bad happens._ She scolded herself, but didn’t have any time to panic because as soon as she felt her nerves tickle, the elevator was at the top. 

She stepped off, delicately, puffing up her chest with the confidence of someone that belonged there. She pressed the button to send the elevator back down.

At the exact moment, the millisecond her hand rose from the button: everything went to shit.

-

All MacCready could see was a vicious burst of orange laser fire over the edge of the overpass three seconds after the elevator started coming back down.

“Fuck!” He shouted, not even thinking to censor himself.

-

If Yoshimi hadn’t been Yoshimi, she would have been dead the second the Assaultron locked on to her foreign facial profile inside the gunner’s base and blew scorching hot laser-fire in her direction. 

Thankfully she knew something was off as soon as she stepped off the elevator. Even at night time, there was quiet and there was _too_ quiet. The energy felt wrong ( _"No, I can't explain it. You can just feel those sorts of things sometimes. Sure, call it luck, whatever."_ ), so she acted accordingly. _So much for the plan_ , she thought as she tucked into a roll to avoid the laser and ran, almost stumbling, toward the docked power armor. She hated power armor. She hated how slow and clunky it was, how she wasn’t able to move her body with the fluidity and ease that was so critical to her fighting style.

Her fighting style didn’t usually account for murderous super-robots, though, so she worked with the cards she was dealt by scrambling behind the hulking mass of metal and jumping in, sighing with a strange, unrestrained relief at the pneumatic hiss that signaled she was safe inside. Safer than she was outside, at least. 

The Assaultron barreled at her, pincers outstretched, an ominous orange glow framing it’s ovular black face as it started charging its next attack. 

Yoshimi braced herself, finding this power armor to be a little nicer than the suit she had picked off of a dead raider, a little easier to move in. She pulled her fist back and tightened her fingers enough to crack knuckles, pulling in a deep breath, and…

-

MacCready scrambled onto the elevator, slamming his fist on the red button half a dozen times in blind panic, profanity spilling from his mouth like fireworks shooting off sideways from a kicked-over bottle rocket. Bullets were raining down on him from two Gunners perched at the top of the elevator, but he was able to pick them off easily enough before he was even halfway up.

What he was worried about was if someone threw a grenade over the edge. He circumvented this fear by taking the grenade string out of his pocket and, with a hearty shout of, “here goes fuckin’ nothing,” he threw it as hard as he could above his head, tugging the string to pull all of the pins at once as they went tumbling over the concrete lip of the overpass.

He ducked and covered his head, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.

The heat from the explosion washed over him with a satisfying fervor. Dogmeat paced in circles below, left behind, barking angrily. The elevator continued to rise.

-

…later on, Yoshimi would consider how lucky a person had to be to conveniently hit an Assaultron in the just right spot on their head to cause it to go spinning from their shoulders. She’d wonder, if she told this story to anyone other than MacCready, if they’d believe that she then took that head and, with the gratifying _schick_ of metal against metal, kicked it off the overpass with the unwieldy foot of her stolen power armor before watching her mercenary for hire emerge from a cloud of fire and smoke to fill the assaultron’s still-fighting body with lead from a pillaged submachine gun.

Their eyes met and the combined energy shared in that single glance could have powered Sanctuary for a month. The rest of fight didn’t last long after that. MacCready threw the SMG to the side and slung his rifle from his shoulder. Yoshimi released herself from the power armor, pulled the fusion core from it’s back, tossed it aside, and unsheathed both of her combat knives from her back. The remaining Gunners bared their teeth, having no idea what they were in for.

-

“Oh my god, Yosh. You keep it up and they’re going to start making a killing selling metal helmets to keep people safe from the legendary vault-dwelling head-popper-offer.”  
“Head-popper-offer? Seriously?”  
“Give me a break. Winlock got me good in the side of the head with the butt of his fu-flippin’ rifle.”

-

They sat on the steps of the Commander’s cabin, both a little dazed, her high from Med-X, him slowly coming down from the adrenaline of the fight. Yoshimi’s eyes were half-open as she rolled her left shoulder, sore from a bullet graze, the fingers of her right hand pressing against the tender flesh on her side where Barnes threw a chunk of concrete at her. “I think I might have a broken rib,” she lilted.

“Here.” MacCready passed her a stimpak from his pack, not even pausing to consider the caps it would cost to replace it. A burgeoning purple and fuchsia bruise was spreading on his temple, his lip was split, and he _definitely_ had a couple broken ribs. She went to reach for it, but missed, “I think I should have only taken the one hit of Med-X. I’m feelin’ a lil’ loopy.” Her head lolled and she leaned against him on the creaky step.

MacCready suppressed a smile, sighing with fake exasperation, “Okay, hey, let me help. Just unzip the front of your suit so I can get at your side.”

“Oh, Robert. Buy a girl a drink first, won’t you?” She chuckled, then laughed harder at the sound of her own laughter. She unzipped her suit, though; without question, sliding it off her shoulder to reveal a simple threadbare black bra and a nasty bruise. MacCready got up from the step and kneeled in front of her, his fingers surprisingly gentle as he touched the injured skin.

Yoshimi couldn’t help but shiver as his skin touched hers. He pretended he didn’t notice.

“You definitely broke a rib. Here we go.” He impulsively ran a thumb over the yellowing flesh, pausing a split second before sliding the Stimpak’s needle into her smooth skin.

“You’re so pure.” He mumbled aloud, surprised that the words even passed his lips. His hand didn’t leave the skin on her side, not yet. He tried to will it away, but as he slowly depressed the plunger of the stimpak, he couldn’t help but keep his hand on her skin as it warmed from the healing. “What?” She whimpered, half-awake.

“Just… the world… this world. It hasn’t ruined you like it has the rest of us. You’re something else. Something better. I dunno.”  
“I think you’re high, RJ.”  
“I’m not the one that took too much Med-X.”  
“I think… I think the Stimpak is done now.”

He breathed a soft, "Ohm" blushing and apologizing as he took his hand and the empty syringe away, letting her zip up her own suit. After the healing medicine, she was a little more awake, though the world still felt fuzzy around the edges. He sat back down next to her and folded his hands in his lap, looking down at them with the focus of a person desperately trying not to look at something right next to them.

“Yoshimi…”  
“Yeah?”  
“Here… it’s the money you gave me in Goodneighbor. I’m, I’m not traveling with you because you’re the boss anymore, I’m, uh, I’m traveling with you because… because…” He stared out over the edge of the overpass, twinkling stars dusting the rolling plains of the commonwealth, “Because I never realized how nice it was to have someone around who had your back. I mean, if you’ll still have me around, that is.” He dropped the small sack into her lap rather unceremoniously, embarrassed at how awkward his speech sounded.

Yoshimi let out a tired sigh and set her hand on top of the bag, leaning her head against his shoulder, “Yeah, I’ll still have you around. We can spend the caps on more Stimpaks.”

She closed her eyes. He closed his eyes. The world gave them a moment to catch their breath.


	8. diamond city

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our little babies talk to Nick, get a little drunk, and talk about some serious stuff. Dogmeat lingers off screen, scratching at fleas.

“Hey, I was thinking. Do you know what Takahashi is saying, since, like, you… you speak the same language, right?”  
“Ugh. No. He speaks Japanese, I speak Chinese. Since it’s the end of the world, I’ll forgive you your racism, but… _ugh, shǎguā._ ”

-

It was late February when Yoshimi and MacCready descended upon the great green jewel of the commonwealth. They were dirty, almost out of food, and dead tired from a month of almost constant travel since joining up together, but the slight familiarity of the grungy city’s market square was oddly comforting. They lingered in the center of the market, security and settlers milling around them, the dull shine of hanging light bulbs offset by the growing darkness of a slow, radioactive sunset

“Hey, Mac, why don’t you stay with the power armor and grab a bowl of noodles and I’ll go talk to Nick about Kellogg.” Yoshimi raised her arms above her head in a stretch, making her words come out as a half-unintelligible groan. The purple rings around her eyes were more pronounced than ever as she tilted her head, releasing her stretch and looking over at Takahashi as he prepared a bowl of his signature soup. Her stomach rumbled unapologetically.

“You look like shit, boss.” MacCready responded, as delicately as he could, “Why don’t we talk to Valentine in the morning? You really need to rest. I don’t know if you remember, but we cleared out three raider holes and defended that one Minutemen settlement from a three day onslaught of rabid mole rats and, honestly…” He pulled his hat off of his head, scratching roughly at the dry skin on the back of his scalp, “you did most of the work.”

“I can’t put off talking to Nick any longer. It won’t take long, anyways.” Each sentence was punctuated by an increasingly world weary sigh.

“Okay, okay. Better plan: we sell the power armor now before Arturo goes in for the night, since you know he has a crush on you and will give ya a good price, and then you meet me at the Dugout for a drink before turning in.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly, the corners of his mouth turned up ever-so-slightly, ever-so-mischeviously.

“Ah… ah, okay. Yeah. That sounds nice. And he totally doesn’t have a crush on me. ( _Everyone has a crush on you, you blind idiot, even the ones trying to kill you_ ). You mind keeping Dogmeat out of trouble?” The shepherd whined in protest, but at the same time nudged his nose against MacCready’s thigh affectionately. Yoshimi couldn’t help but feel slightly jealous at how much her dog and the merc had bonded over the last few weeks.

“Your wish is my command, boss.” MacCready cut into her self-indulgent thoughts with a chuckle and an over-dramatic bow. _He's becoming our dog, and you know it._ He smiled inwardly at the thought. _Eventually we'll need to work out a custody arrangement if we ever stop traveling together._

-

_I hope we don't stop traveling together._

-

They parted ways after selling the power armor from the Mass Pike Interchange and Yoshimi felt a little better with the weight of a serious surplus of caps in her pocket (“Ah, Yoshimi! It’s been too long! We’ve missed you around here! At least, I’ve missed you. Looks like you’ve got some amazing loot for me today, like usual.” combined with MacCready stifling his snickers behind his hat). 

MacCready took a left, toward the Dugout Inn, Dogmeat at his heels, while she took a right to make her way to Valentine’s Detective Agency.

When she opened the door and slid inside, the familiar synth detective was hunched over his desk in the exact same pose he had been in when she last spoke to him. _Did he bother to move at all while I was gone?_ , she mused, forcing a small cough to catch his attention. When he looked up from his desk, his center-of-the-sky-full-moon eyes focused on her, widened slightly in surprise, then returned to neutral. A small, tight frown warped his metallic features.

“You’ve been gone so long, no one had seen you. I assumed you had either found your son and ran off or…” The frown got a little deeper.

“I’m sorry, Nick. I found Kellogg, but the way things went down, I just… I don’t know…” She strode over to the seat across from his desk and let herself crumple into it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her forehead nestled into her palms. She spoke to the floor instead of his face. “Dogmeat led me to his compound and when I eventually got to him, I just… I just… I snapped. I put my knife through his throat before he even had a chance to explain himself. He probably could have told me something valuable, but I didn’t give him the chance. Afterwards, I felt kind of… I don’t know… lost. It wasn’t me. I don’t do those things… I don’t, sorry, I’m just really tired and didn’t want to put off talking to you any more. I’m not sure what to do next.”

Nick sighed and Yoshimi could see the wires in his neck vibrate, ever so slightly, from the motion of his jaw. She leaned her head to the side, still in her hands, watching him sideways, slightly out of focus. She braced herself for the disappointment. He should be disappointed in her. She was supposed to help him help her find Shaun and she killed their best bet at making progress.

“You alright, sweetheart?” His voice was a soft mechanical purr, and he played the part of doting confidant well. She felt something in her crack at his unexpected response. First, one tear fell. Then, another. Then she found herself nestled under the trench coat of a back-alley robo-sleuth as she sobbed herself dry, his good hand pressed gently against the small of her back as he stood next to her, smoking and sighing.

-

Yoshimi pulled herself together quickly enough, and within ten minutes she was back to her straight-backed, serious-faced self. Nicks coat was still draped on her shoulders as she laid out the neural implant and other mechanical salvage she was able to take from Kellogg’s corpse.

“It felt weird leaving it behind, because it seemed so important, or, valuable, or, _something_.”

“Only you would kill a man and then rip his neural implant out because _'or something'_.”

“Oh shush, you old tin can. I picked up a pretty pristine carton of San Francisco Sunlights for you while I was there, but I’m thinking of just throwing them in a bonfire for the hell of it now if you're going to keep up the sass.” She smiled at him, softly, chidingly, before asking: “Do you think there’s anything we can do with it? The implant?”

“Actually, yes, but I won’t tell you until you hand over the smokes.”

 _I don’t deserve a friend as kind as you._ The thought floated above every other voice in her head and lingered there, steady, as she watched him slowly unwrap the package, pull a cigarette out, and light it. Yoshimi met Nick’s gaze, wondering if he knew what she was thinking.

He did, but he didn’t particularly agree.

-

Yoshimi’s steps were decidedly lighter as she entered the Dugout Inn. Having made a plan with Nick, she felt a focus that she had been lacking since she killed Kellogg. She was tired still, tired down to the marrow in her bones, but she also felt light, like things might actually turn out okay. She wanted to celebrate the feeling, tie it to a string and let it float above her like a hopeful pink balloon as she ambled through the streets of Diamond City.

Her newfound optimism caused her to pause, just for a moment, at the Port-o-Diner near the inn’s front door, which in turn led her to hear MacCready speak to Vadim, the bar’s proprietor, as he emerged from the bar’s back room.

"MacCready! Is good to see you, _tovarisch_. How is Lucy? She still as beautiful as I remember?"

She looked up, almost involuntarily, from the claw machine because she heard MacCready's name being spoken aloud, and she felt guilty about it the second she saw him flinch at the words. His face flashed something foreign as soon as the unfamiliar name was uttered – _Lucy_ – he shifted into a different person, someone who was all shadow, ash, and regret. His mouth curled small and tight as he turned his seat toward the bar, and Vadim, to mutter, “No… she didn’t make it, Vadim.” His face returned to his usual as quickly as it had changed: the shadows parted for a small, self-deprecating sigh followed by a smirk.

“Ah, sorry, mouth faster than brain. Here, next drink on the house.”  
“It’s okay, buddy, I know. Thanks, you’ve always been a really stand-up guy.” MacCready forced a low chuckle, “I’ve already bought a bottle, but hey – if you’re feeling generous, I have a friend coming and she could use a drink, so why don’t you hook her up on my behalf?”

Yoshimi lingered at the Port-o-Diner, feeling like she had stumbled upon a secret, precious thing entirely by accident, unsure what to do. She placed a cap in the slot and sighed when the pincers missed the prize she had aimed for, then, turning, she exhaled and walked to meet her friend up at the bar.

-

“Do you know how expensive apartments in Diamond City are? How do you just… have one… and… _hic_ … a bunch of settlements… and everything else? Look at this place! There’s a tub… with… a shower? Running water? _Seriously_? A toilet that isn’t a hole in the ground?! You have _FOOD_ in a cupboard just _WAITING_ to be eaten! There are books! You have real, unburnt books, and… a couch! And lamps! And… _oh god_ … I’m dizzy.”

By the time Yoshimi had approached him at the bar, MacCready was already a third of the way through a bottle of unlabeled bourbon. By the time Vadim delicately sat an uncorked philter of red wine in front of her, he was a third and a quarter of the way through.

It didn’t take long for the both of them to do the math and end up with empty bottles clutched in rosy fists. Yoshimi was drunk. MacCready was _drunk_. She had slung his arm over her shoulder and they stumbled their way back to the market, back to Home Plate, back to her secret apartment away from all the responsibilities she seemed to continuously collect as she continued on her journey. Dogmeat nudged the door open for them before quietly retiring to his doghouse in the farthest corner, more interested in a nap than their people problems.

MacCready was the first non-dog person she had let inside. She briefly considered the fact that he might be the last, all while lowering him gently into a sitting position on the couch and skipping over to the fridge to pull out two bottles of purified water. When she returned, he had shrugged himself out of his hat, his duster, his boots, and his pants, leaning backwards with his head lolled onto his shoulder in just his green button down, socks, and a pair of undershorts in desperate need of a wash.

He was smiling goofily at her. “I drank too much, Yo.” _Giggle._

“Yes, yes you did. I did too.” She handed him the water and he clutched it clumsily in his hand, liquid spilling from the corner of his mouth as he took a sloppy swig. 

“Not like me. You should sit next to me. Okay. Sit. Oh-kay.” He patted the rough green fabric of the couch cushion next to him. 

She plopped down, unable to hold back a snort of laughter at his exuberance. The light from light bulbs strung zig-zag across the room’s two main walls cast long, geometric orange shadows across the floor and their faces. Their was a moment of brief, peaceful quiet before Yoshimi’s inebriation led her to ask, rather abruptly, “Who is Lucy? I didn't mean to hear, but, but I did, and...”

MacCready turned his whole body toward her on the couch, bringing one leg up and curling it under himself. He was quiet for a beat, then two, arching his head down before sighing, his voice strangely distant, “She was my wife. She... died. Pack of ferals. I couldn’t protect her, you know? I… I have a son, too. I… it’s a long story, though, and I’m pretty drunk... I dunno.”

Yoshimi impulsively reached up, bending two fingers and tucking them under his chin to tilt it back upwards so his eyes would meet her own. The smile she gave him then was a delicate gift, the best she could muster: something genuine, honest, and purely affectionate. Soft, curved all the way up to the corners of her eyes, an offering of mutual vulnerability and friendship. “How about I trade the water for another bottle of wine and we get all of our secrets out before the sun rises? Tomorrow, we’ll take the day off to recover.”

_I’m done. I’m gone. I’m so sorry, Lucy. I never deserved you, and I’ll never deserve her, but I’ll spend my whole god damn life trying. Maybe… maybe I can make things a little better, at least for Duncan, at least for tomorrow, or the next day, and maybe she can help me. Maybe I can open up, let her in, just a little, just a little, just… god, Lucy, you’d like her, you know? She’s beautiful. Inside and out. Something else. She's going to change the whole fuckin' world. Really. I hope… I hope you’re up there and you’re looking down and you understand what I’m feeling right now and it’s okay, because… I’m just… yeah, it’s too late now, too late to go back. I can't lose her. I can't. I won't. I won't._

“That… that sounds nice.”

"Okay!"


	9. secrets/a day off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a lil fluff 'n stuff. More backflips coming tomorrow. 
> 
> (Dogmeat spent this chapter playing with the kids at the schoolhouse, giving his humans some space and making Mr. Zwicky laugh once or twice.)

_He told her about Lucy, and the way she was so good at caring for people. How her hair was dark like Yoshimi’s and how she laughed at his panic when she gave birth to Duncan in an abandoned subway car. He told her about being the best dressed settlers in the Capital Wasteland because she was so good with her hands, small hands, deft hands, hands that could close wounds and sew stitches. He told her about how sometimes, at night, he struggled to remember the way her voice sounded and felt so guilty because it had only been four years since she died, and that you weren’t supposed to forget things like that._

_She told him about her father, and how she felt like he was the only person who ever completely understood her. She told him about practicing tai chi chu’an in the carport, about how he’d make his own soap in the back shed. Soap that smelled like ginger and jasmine, soap that smelled of lychee. How her father would tell her that he made the soap so he would not forget the way his childhood home smelled, the way his own mother smelled. She told him about her mother dying when giving birth to her, never knowing her, and the way her father never seemed to get over her death. She told him about the man who murdered him in front of her when she was seventeen. She told him about the way the man had screamed at him for being an unapologetic commie that was ruining his country and the way the man’s hands shook as he raised the gun. She told him about the way it felt when her bàba sighed out her name with his last breath in the parking lot of the corner store. The way it felt when the police barely acknowledged what happened even though she had screamed and screamed and screamed, told them who did it, told them she knew. The way she became invisible when he died. The way it felt like she’d never be honestly, truly loved ever again._

_He told her about Duncan, now old enough to write him scratchy letters and sit on the top deck of Rivet City to count birds as they flew past. He told her about his friend, a vault dweller like her, that was looking after Duncan with her husband while he attempted to find a cure for the disease that ailed him. He told her about promising to be a better person, about the reason he tried to never swear, about all the promises he had made and was afraid to break. He told her about the blue boils, the attempts to get into Med Tek for a cure, the lost hope, the way the ghouls always overwhelmed him because he wasn’t skilled enough at close-quarters combat, the way he sometimes drank too much because whiskey was easier to swallow than all the self loathing._

_She told him about Nate, about the way his hair was so red it would seemingly catch fire in the right light. Autumn light, just as dusk was falling, through the back window of their house as he sat at the kitchen table cleaning his gun, or reading the paper. She told him that she had only known Nate for three months before they got married, and got pregnant so quickly afterwards that she spent a lot of their marriage feeling like she was losing herself in the high tide, battling against the current. She told him she understood the feeling of guilt, of feeling like you were disappointing everyone around you, because she didn’t miss Nate that much, not really. She was sad that the world had taken him in such a violent way, she mourned the man he could have been, but she told him that she always felt that Nate married her for the idea of what she could be instead of the person she actually was. She told him that it was hard to be with someone who was always looking past you, never looking at you, no matter how much love was actually there or not. She told him that she wasn't sure she'd know how to be a proper mother to Shaun if she ever found him, not in a world that was so unapologetic, so unforgiving._

_He told her about the Gunners, and the lives he had took. He told her about the jobs he was forced into doing as the only sniper who could regularly handle 1000 meter shots. He told her how sick it would make him to look through his scope at someone crouched over a campfire, trying to stay alive, not knowing that they were one exhalation away from oblivion because someone out there wanted them dead enough to pay for it. He told her the day he left was the day they asked him to take out a child because his father refused to pay a ransom, how they wanted it quick and quiet so people wouldn’t kick up a fuss. He told her that he only got as far as a few blocks from their compound before he was doubled over, throwing up onto the pavement because his stomach was tied into so many knots he could barely breathe._

_She told him about going to college, what college even was. She told him about Harvard, about not making any friends when she was in school because she could only afford to go because of a scholarship she couldn't risk losing. She told him about what scholarships were, about how the world back them seemed so strange compared to the world now. She told him about the way people had treated her, the cruelty she faced, because she was Chinese, even if she was American born, and how she felt sick when she’d see people treating synths the same way. She told him about helping refugees, about working all day and all night to try and make life better for people. She told him about how she wasn’t sure if the person she was back then would approve of the person she had become in the wasteland._

_He told her about Little Lamplight, about punching Princess and the way he used to curse because he felt it made him seem stronger, tougher. He told her about the constant panic he felt trying to keep a city full of children alive, and happy, and safe. He told her about Knock Knock and Knick Knack. He told her about Ginger, Hooligan, Rex, Pete, Muttface, and Bandit. He told her about everyone and the intricate ways their small lives intersected. He told her about Big Town. He told her about reading Shakespeare’s complete works over and over and over because it was one of the only books they had in the library that was completely readable save for the last fifteen pages of Macbeth. He told her about how he had always wondered how it ended._

_She told him how Macbeth ended._

_He told her he didn’t deserve a friend like her after all the things he had done. She told him that friendship wasn’t about what you deserved, it was about who you were, and he was a good man. He told her he wasn’t a good man. She told him he was an idiot… and a good man, whether he agreed with her or not._

-

They fell asleep on the couch, her curled up into an egg shape against the far left armrest, him stretched out, his head on the other armrest, his feet tucked under her bottom for warmth. There were three empty bottles of wine on the ground, the sun was rising, and the great green jewel glowed just a little brighter for a few sweet moments.

-

MacCready woke up first, and, based on the bright light shining in through the cracks in the aluminum siding, guessed it was mid-afternoon. He groaned, feeling a soft pounding behind his eyes as he paused a few moments, relishing the warmth of his sleep as it slipped away into wakefulness. He looked over at Yoshimi, curled up at the other end of the couch, her hair down and cascading over her hunched back and shoulders in a thick dark wave. Her breathing was soft and steady, her mouth hanging open ever-so-slightly. He leaned forward and pulled his feet up, curling his arms around his legs, resting his chin on his knees to look at her. She looked so small and vulnerable, her face flush from the last night’s drinking. _You know better, don’t you, though. She’s not small, she’s a giant. She’s a fuckin’ Amazonian. She’s carryin’ us all whether she realizes it or not._ He sighed, smiling despite himself, before turning to get up and stretch his legs. Dogmeat was nowhere to be seen, but he wasn’t worried – the dog had a whole world unto himself that none of them were privy to.

MacCready pulled his pants on and shoved his feet unceremoniously into his boots, stealing one quick glance at Yoshimi before stumbling out of the apartment’s front door and into the sunlight.

-

When he came back inside twenty minutes later, shuffling slowly as he held two hot and almost-overflowing bowls of Takahashi’s noodles in his hands, Yoshimi was emerging from behind the tattered curtain she hung to divide the bathroom from the main room. The way she smiled at him when she saw him was different somehow, as if the moments they shared the night previous had shifted something inside of her. She suddenly didn’t seem like he’d cut himself on all her edges the second he tried to get near her. 

She wore a long baseball jersey that hung down to mid-thigh and nothing else, her feet bare on the dusty rugs. Her hair hung long and wet down her back and she groaned with audible pleasure when she inhaled and smelled the noodles, a lightness in her voice that was startling.

He almost dropped the bowls when he saw her, scrubbed clean from the blood of the wastes, standing five foot even and completely unguarded in front of him. 

“I…” He mumbled, finding himself suddenly lost for words.  
“Thank you, RJ.” She took a bowl from him and tilted it against her lips to swallow some steaming broth, closing her eyes contentedly. She turned and walked back to the couch they had nested on the night before and sat, taking another slow, small sip of the noodle soup.

“You can wash, if you want. I got some abraxo and a bucket out for us to clean our clothes, but… well, I pulled some stuff out you might like. We can relax the rest of the day and tomorrow morning it’s off to Goodneighbor and the Memory Den.” When she spoke, she nodded her head toward a small pile of things sitting on an overturned milk crate near where MacCready was standing. The pile included a pair of dark wash denim jeans, surprisingly unripped, a white men’s t-shirt, a thick leather jacket with Atom Cats printed on the back, and a pair of black motorcycle boots. Next to the pile on the ground was a duo of beautifully made studded leather greaves. “The clothes have all been scavenged and washed, the armor I made a while back and have been holding on to. I… I mean, you don’t have to wear it, but I thought it might be nice to have two sleeves for once. Also, I was thinking, after Goodneighbor, let's hit Med Tek. I'm good in close quarters, and you said that was your main issue, so... so, together, we should be able to get your son what he needs.”

MacCready had been silent during the entire exchange, still, just watching, taking it all in. He mumbled one more time, “I…”

_I love you. I love you so much._

“I am definitely in need of a wash. I smell like a mole rats’ asshole.” _Nice one, Robert._


	10. hubris comics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little fightin', a little dancin, a little... well, you'll see.

There was a certain scent of hopefulness filling the air as MacCready and Yoshimi took their first steps out of Diamond City’s front gate after their day and a half of respite. They were clean, they were well-fed, their weapons were oiled and their packs were filled with all of the bullets and bandages a properly prepared wastelander could ever need. MacCready paused and sucked in a deep breath as they walked into the street, arching his back in a languid stretch and raising his arms above his head, still shadowed by the huge open entrance’s front over hang

“Smells like hopefulness, Yo. Hopefulness smells like…”  
“Super mutant shit and broken down buildings?”  
“Yep, exactly!”

Dogmeat would have rolled his eyes at them if only he knew how.

-

Yoshimi had promised Valentine that they’d be in Goodneighbor as soon as possible. She insisted they wouldn’t get side-tracked or go scavving at all on the journey over – in fact, she exclaimed, they might even get to the Memory Den before he did.

They had been traveling for less than six hours before they ended up without-a-doubt sidetracked.

-

“COMICS? Is that a comic shop? We have to stop. We have to!”  
“RJ, I told him we’d be there as soon as possible. For all we know that place could be crawling with raiders. Going in will set us back at least another day.”  
“I know, I know… but, when else are we going to have this chance? It’s not like we have a lot of time for sight seeing, all things considered, and it’s a comic shop. You told me about that one time you dressed up as Captain Cosmos for Halloween as a kid. Remember? How sad you were about never finding one of the decoder rings they had in the boxes of Sugar Bombs? Come ON.”  
“I’m never drinking wine with you again. Okay. Okay. We go in slow and quiet, there’s no telling what could be inside.”  
“Aye aye, boss.”

-

Not intimidated by the dead raider on the doorstep, Yoshimi, MacCready, and Dogmeat crouched low outside the front door of Hubris Comics. They shared a communal nod before nudging the door open and peeking inside. Dust motes swirled and drifted through the stagnant air, illuminated by lines of midday light from the entryway. MacCready nudged the muzzle of his rifle inside and angled it around, looking for potential targets, feeling an insatiable tickle in his nostrils as soon as he inhaled. The tickle turned to a sneeze. The sneeze woke up a sitting monkey toy perched near the door, wielding button jewel eyes and a grin that felt just a little too wide to be anything but sinister. The toy started boorishly banging tiny metal cymbals together.

That’s when the ferals came.

-

“Damn it, MacCready!”

The front room was far too small for MacCready to easily use his rifle, so the second she heard the tell-tale scratching sound of ghouls clawing against dilapidated wood, she rushed in to defend his position. In a single motion she tossed her 10 mm back to him, unsheathed both of her combat knives from her back, and slid one smooth blade into the rotting eye socket of an especially fast stalker. A second came from the back of the store, though a hole in the wall, while two more ambled into the small front room from a back stairway.

Dogmeat went for the one on the right while MacCready and Yoshimi went left.

One bullet, two bites, and three slashes later, there was quiet… almost quiet, save for the tell-tale shuffling sounds of more ghouls overhead.

Yoshimi sighed heavily, wiping her blades off on a tattered flannel hanging loosely from the sprawled corpse of a ghoul (throatless, courtesy of Dogmeat). MacCready looked at her levelly, “You good, boss?”

“Yeah, just… ugh… it’s so stuffy in here. I hate ferals. They’re just so… smelly.”  
“Yeah, me too…”  
“Oh. _Oh_ , RJ, sorry, I must sound so petty.  
“No, no, it’s okay. Stop looking at me like that. It really is okay. Plus, that last feral smelled positively… _ghoulish._ "

Yoshimi rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t stifle the smile that accompanied the action.

-

They rummaged around the first floor a lot longer than they normally did during scavs. One because they were reluctant to take care of the ghouls they knew were ambling around upstairs (Dogmeat, ever-the-defender, was guarding the back stair in case any of them decided to take a trip downstairs while his people were digging in display cases), two because they were in Hubris Comics and there was _cool stuff everywhere_.

“Look at this!” Yoshimi couldn’t hide the slight hint of excitement in her voice as she called to MacCready from the other side of what appeared to be an office kiddy-corner to the main room they entered from. When he turned he saw her holding a square framed black-and-white photograph. “It’s a signed photo of the Silver Shroud! How cool is that?”

He chuckled, wiping dust from the file cabinet he was looking through on the thighs of his blue jeans, walking over to get a closer look. “You were a nerd, huh?” He took the photo from her, wiping the frame clean with the sleeve of his jacket. “All you told me about was the Captain Cosmos costume, but I’m thinking there’s more to it. Did you ever come here before the war?”

Yoshimi snatched the photo frame back from him, a delicate laugh rumbling in her throat despite her best effort to suppress it. “I did, actually, back when I was in college. This place was a legend back then. I was always too broke to buy any comics because all my extra money went to food and schoolbooks, but I think the guy who ran the shop at the time had a soft spot for me. He’d never give me crap for endlessly browsing even though I’d see him hassle people who would linger for half the time as me.” She trailed off, looking down at the photograph in her hands, a faraway look on her face. MacCready pretended not to see the way the gold flecks in her irises seemed to pulse and glow when she was trying not to get upset, instead nudging her in the ribs with his elbow and exclaiming, “Hey, nerd, there was a big display case behind the register. How about you put those lock picking skills to good use?”

“I am half the nerd you are, Mr. I-can-quote-every-issue-of-Grognak-the-Barbarian-ever-made.”  
“That’s DOCTOR I-can-quote-every-issue-of-Grognak-the-Barbarian-ever-made to you.”

They made their way back into the front room, MacCready pausing to duck into the back stairway and check on Dogmeat, tossing him a chunk of bloatfly jerky he had found in a cooler in the office. The dog yipped, wagged his tail and began gnawing on the jerky, content to continue being their guardian. By the time MacCready was back next to Yoshimi, she already had the case open.

In her hands was a huge, shining axe with a banded haft and curved blade – huge, at least half her height. “Holy sh-I mean, fu-je-uh-sh-oh my goodness, Yoshimi. It’s Grognak’s axe. It’s his f-fu-fuh-flipping AXE!” She offered it to him but he put his palms up in equal parts fear and reverence, “That thing can only be wielded by someone like you, not me. No way.”

“Someone like me?”  
“You know, someone who is good with their hands. I’d end up cutting my own head off with that thing.”

A wicked glint appeared in Yoshimi’s steady gaze. She stepped back, getting a feel for the weight of the axe in her hands, tossing it readily from one palm to the next a few times before planting her feet and leaning back, throwing her weight into a swing that cleanly diced a wooden magazine rack in two, lodging the blade into the floor with a heavy thunk. She wiggled it a couple times to free it, pulling it up to balance on her shoulder as she looked back over at MacCready.

“Wanna go kill some more ghouls? This place has three more floors to look through!”

MacCready took the suppressed 10 mm from his belt and looked from her weapon to his, then back again, “If I were the sort to worry about that sort of thing, I might be worried that this was an affront to my manliness.” Yoshimi nudged her shoulder against him as she walked past, toward the back stair, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t worry, buddy, we all already knew I had bigger balls than you did.”

His disgruntled sigh was cut off by Dogmeat’s giddy bark of agreement echoing back from the stairwell.

_I’m going to kill so many more ghouls than you up there, Yoshimi. Just you watch._

-

The second floor was relatively empty. Four ghouls total, all of them decayed to the point where just walking was a challenge. MacCready took out two while Yoshimi axed the head clean off of the third and Dogmeat took the last one down with his teeth. They didn’t find much other than a couple telephones Yoshimi insisted on shoving into her pack and an unopened bottle of Nuka Cola Quantum that MacCready insisted be “his share of the loot.” The third floor wasn’t much worse and they cleared out the duo of ghouls they encountered without much effort past the reloading of a handgun and the swing of an axe.

As they lingered at the stairwell to the top floor, listening intently to see if they could count out how many ghouls they would encounter, Yoshimi commented off hand that her shoulders were starting to hurt from the weight of the axe before shrugging and slugging it up the rest of the stairs.

Three minutes later she was on the floor with a huge gash in her thigh and a glowing one crouched over her as her blood pooled, sticky and unforgiving, on the floor around her.

Before she passed out she idly thought how disappointed she would be to die so soon after discovering… after finding… after falling… after… 

-

“Wake up. Wake up. _Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup._ Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god.”

Yoshimi opened her eyes and saw a world out of focus. Blurry, all soft edges and illegible geometries. She felt simultaneously cold and warm and when she tried to form coherent thoughts they came out in a jumble – not quite words or phrases, just passing feelings, snapshots, bits of fluff. There was a definite warmth right behind her head and she pressed her skull into it, relishing the soft steady beating sound of… a heart? She tilted her head back and saw MacCready looking down at her, his eyes red-rimmed and near panic. He was breathing heavily as he watched her. He didn’t have a smart-ass comment or quip, in fact, he didn’t have any words at all. He just wrapped his arms around her torso from behind and placed his chin on top of her head. She was nestled between his legs, spread and bent at hard angles, Dogmeat curled against her wounded thigh, his head resting on her knee, monitoring them quietly.

“Just let me do this for a second. I know it’s inappropriate but, fu-frig, Yoshimi. That glowing one knocked you cold and the axe was so heavy I couldn’t catch it and it fell and it cut you, but it wasn’t just a little cut. It hit your thigh and I think maybe an… an… a vein? Whatever they’re called. There was so much blood. I thought you were dead. I… I just started shooting and yelling and then...” He let out a strained, almost hysteric giggle, “I found a Grognak costume in one of the lockers and used his loin cloth to tie the wound shut, then the belt to keep it shut. Used Stimpaks and Med-Ex.”

“’ow… long…?”  
“Two hours.”  
“S…sorry.”  
“Shut up, you idiot. And be still. You lost a lot of blood. You need to just sit for a while. You’ll be fine soon. You’ll be fine. You’ll be… sorry, it’s just… I really, really, _really fuckin’ hate ghouls._ ”  
“I’m… tellin’… Duncan tha’ you… swore.”  
“Ha… fair enough.”

He sighed, deep and long, and she felt the heat of it ruffle her hair and warm her scalp. She shivered in his embrace. Her head felt so heavy, felt like it was filled with damp cotton balls, felt… felt like... she stopped trying to think and let herself slump against his chest.

-

At one point she woke up for a few moments and could have swore she felt a thumb idly sliding up and down the arch of her right cheekbone.

-

It was deep into the night when she finally woke up without the feeling that a colony of fat, unpleasant bees were buzzing their way through her entire vascular system. She was curled up on the floor next to Dogmeat, MacCready’s Atom Cats jacket draped over her body. The soft light of three different lanterns made the room glow ever-so-slightly. She draped one arm over Dogmeat’s body and nuzzled her face into the fur on his neck, receiving a quiet contented whine in return. _Where’s_ … she thought, before turning her head and noticing a small side office and a shadowy mercenary leaning over a computer terminal, reading from the screen intently. He looked almost otherworldy with the dull green light highlighting the dramatic planes and valleys of his face, his mouth hanging open slightly as he stared at the screen, an unlit cigarette dangling from one corner.

Yoshimi felt a strange tightening in her chest, and it definitely wasn’t from the chems she had taken earlier in the day.

She rolled onto her knees and slowly tried to stand, finding it surprisingly pain free. She reached down to unhook Grognak’s belt and peel the stained maroon loin cloth from her leg, setting both gingerly on an adjacent desk. The skin was sealed and a puffy pink six inch scar arced over the top of her thigh. “Modern medicine, I tell ya.” She mumbled to herself, only slightly irritated at the idea of having to patch up her Vault Suit before they left. She looked over at MacCready again. He still hadn’t noticed her. She smiled softly and, running a hand through her hair to pull it out of it’s bun, detangling knots with her fingers as she walked, wandered over to talk to him.

“Hey.” She spoke low and quiet so she wouldn’t startle him into putting a bullet in her. “Nick’s going to be pretty annoyed, huh? How long did I sleep?”

Relief was written on his face plain as day as he looked up at her, pulling the cigarette from his mouth to tuck it behind one ear. “All day. I secured the place while you slept, so we can stay here for the night. No one’s sneaking up on us unless they want a very grenade-y welcome. How’s your leg?” His eyes darted down and lingered at the exposed flesh of her thigh.

Yoshimi felt weirdly shy and placed a hand over the scar, mumbling, “Fine. I’m fine. Stimpaks’ll do that to you.” _What is going on with you, Yoshimi? What happened? You’re acting like a schoolgirl._ “What’re you doing?”

Finally free from worrying about Yoshimi, MacCready grinned, leaning back in the chair, nodding his head toward the screen. “They have all the controls for the Silver Shroud TV show on here. Lighting, everything. There were even some holotapes in the desk with music on them but I was scared to play them while you were sleeping because, y’know, sleeping. I’m not really sure how to turn things on, though…” He scrunched up his face and stretched back in the chair, stifling a yawn, the white t-shirt he was wearing sliding up ever so slightly to reveal the thinnest strip of stomach. Yoshimi made a point of not looking.

“Here, get up. Let me look.”  
“Yosh, don’t push yourself, you could still…”  
“I’m the boss, remember? I’m fine. I slept all day. Let me look.”

Unlike MacCready, Yoshimi had no trouble with computers. In less than a minute, the sound stage they could see from their perch behind the computer was lit by muted yellow, magenta, and cyan lights, sliding to and fro in a lazy, shifting pattern. Soft music played from overhead speakers, only crackling and squeaking ever-so-slightly from the years out of use.

_♫ That old black magic's got me in its spell ♫_

“Oh wow…” Yoshimi couldn’t help but gasp with childish joy at the sound of the music. In the back of her mind she knew it was a danger, even with the precautions downstairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn it off. Maybe it was indulgent, or foolish, or one of a thousand things – but in that moment, in that room, the crooning male vocals brought Yoshimi a certain lightness that she couldn’t let go of.

_♫ That old black magic that you weave so well ♫_

“Hey…” MacCready’s voice was soft, almost impossible for her to hear. She looked up at him and saw that he was reaching a hand out towards her. “You sure that legs ok?”

_♫ Those icy fingers ♫_

She nodded, wordless.

_♫ Up and down my spine ♫_

“Then, Yoshimi, boss, uh… care to dance?”

_♫ The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine ♫_

She hesitated a second. She had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that if she took his hand, everything would change somehow. That if she let her fingers slip, so easily, into his outstretched palm, that she’d never quite get them back. They’d be permanently changed, they’d never quite be the same hands she grew up with, the ones she left the vault with. They’d be new, transformed, more part of the new world than the old one.

_♫ The same old tingle that I feel inside ♫_

She slipped her hand into his.

_♫ And when that elevator starts its ride ♫_

MacCready led her out to the sound stage and gingerly placed one hand on the small of her back, looking softly down at her as they swayed slowly, slightly awkwardly. “I don’t really know how to dance. Knick Knack tried teaching me once, but I was a sh… I was a difficult kid. I never tried. Not even after I left.”

_♫ Darling down and down I go, round and round I go ♫_

She let her fingers slip so easily into the spaces between his, unable to look away from the way that every time an overhead magenta light slid across his face, his eyes lit up like bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum. “It’s ok,” her voice was lower than she was accustomed to, almost husky, without her trying for it, “I haven’t danced in over 200 years.”

_♫ Like a leaf that's ♫_

“You know, boss…”

_♫ Caught in the tide ♫_

“Robert…”

_♫ I should stay away but what can I do ♫_

“When you fell earlier, I felt… I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time, and… with the world like it is, time's so short, and, you know...”

_♫ I hear your name, and I'm aflame ♫_

Yoshimi could see the hesitation in his eyes. She could feel the slight tension as their feet shuffled slowly to and fro. She knew what he was going to say before he said it and in that moment she felt something click into place. She felt light, like a feather drifting on a sweet summer breeze, and she felt okay. She felt…

_♫ Aflame with such a burning desire ♫_

…she felt like she wanted him to say what she thought he was going to say.

_♫ That only your kiss can put out the fire ♫_

“I mean, I just… I don’t want to ruin anything… we have a lot to do, and there’s your son, and…”

_♫ You're the lover ♫_

“…and I want to help you find him, just like you’re helping me with Duncan, and…”

_♫ You're the lover ♫_

“…I know it’s only been, like, two months of just knowing each other, but…”

_♫ You're the lover ♫_

“…you’re so fu-flipping confounding and… beautiful, a-and…”

_♫ You're the lover ♫_

“…amazing… and… I just… I…”

_♫ I have waited for ♫_

They had been standing still for at least fifteen seconds as the music played on before she leaned forward on her toes and pressed her lips against his. Gently, searchingly, softly. 

_♫ Yes I'm in a spin, I'm loving the spin I'm in ♫_

He tensed at first, worried he was making a mistake, worried he was manipulating her somehow, worried that she was still buzzing from her afternoon chem cocktail, worried he would never be good enough for her, for this, for any of it. Then he felt the rough pad of her thumb against the line of stubble on his jaw, and he stopped worrying.

_♫ I'm under that old black magic called love ♫_

“Boss…” He mumbled against her mouth, sliding one hand against her neck, gently cupping the back of her head, the other resting against her opposite cheek, a thumb traveling over the cut of her high cheekbone. Yoshimi warmed at the recent familiarity of the gesture.

_♫ Got me spinning and spinning and spinning around ♫_

“This is going to be complicated, isn’t it…? It's going to be... with so much... I... I'm... I...” 

_♫ Like an elevator's going down ♫_

“For once in your life, Robert James MacCready, would you please _just shut the hell up?_ ” Yoshimi pressed herself forward so their torsos were flat against one another. She kissed him again, and again, and again – in quick, sweet, sudden succession – before opening her mouth just enough to give him another kiss, a kiss that meant business. A kiss that meant _I am yours now, please don’t destroy me_. A kiss that pretended it wasn’t the end of the world. A kiss that promised more than an evening, more than a week, more than two months. A kiss that tasted like Christmas morning, freedom, rolling waves of Nuka Cola and a horizon that wasn’t buzzing with radiation. A kiss that whispered good morning as the sun rose and goodnight as it sunk. A kiss, Yoshimi thought, that meant the future wasn’t as bleak as she had previously thought.

_♫ In this magic, black magic called love ♫_

MacCready did as he was told and shut up, pulling Yoshimi into an embrace that couldn’t be described as anything but close, starting to sway to the music once more. Dogmeat laid on the floor, eyes closed, pretending he was still asleep as they danced, and danced, and danced, and danced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the version of the song I imagined them dancing to:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkpSRAenEdU


	11. memory den

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Main questline stuff. Memory den. Progressing the story. Dogmeat disappears a lot. Blah blah blah.

“Hey, Yo. Are things going to be different in the morning?”  
“Well, they aren’t going to be the same.”  
“I just mean…”  
“I know. I know. Things will be… they’ll be fine. Go to sleep, you need it.”

-

They danced for hours, to the same song on repeat. Mumbling, kissing, laughing before eventually fighting over who would take first watch. Yoshimi won, taking a computer chair and sliding it over next to the small warm pile of MacCready and Dogmeat, curled up together and snoring. Her 10 mm was cradled in her lap and her hair was down around her shoulders, acting as a makeshift blanket. The lights were low, just one lantern left on, and her thoughts filled the echoing silence of the room.

_Was that a mistake? Was that a mistake? Was that a mistake? Was that a mistake?_

She watched his face, barely visible save for a series of angular shadows playing out on and around his head. He looked serene in an honest way he didn’t possess while waking. He was a man constantly putting on a face: pretending he was lighter, pretending he was happier, pretending he didn’t worry as much as he did. She could see it slip once in a while, like that afternoon when his eyes were lit with fear. Right now, she thought, he must be dreaming about something nice. 

She knew that no matter what she said to him the next day when the harsh sun was up and they weren’t playing around in dreamscapes and moonlight, he’d respond with a laugh and an, “ _Alright, boss._ ”

Her heart felt heavy with the low, swinging song of regret. I _t was too soon. There’s so much left to be done. He even said, and I pushed anyways. I…_

He stirred in his sleep next to her; a soft snore, a snort, the faintest chime of far away laughter as he rolled to his side and his hand flopped onto the floor, palm up.

She wanted so badly to press her lips to the lines and callouses mapped there that it made her stomach churn. _Even if it was too soon, even if it’s going to be a challenge going forward, with everything, I can’t… I can’t just let this pass with a laugh and a whisper. This is something else. This is… l-no, I don’t know, but I know I need him._

She decided that, for that moment, that night, in that dark room, that was enough for her. She sat and she watched, silent and serene, as the minutes slipped by.

-

She was supposed to wake him after three hours so they could switch watch duty, but she was as stubborn as she was determined to be strong, so she let him sleep. 

When he woke, it was with the sun. He blinked once, twice, before finding some clarity and focusing his eyes on the form of a slender woman a meter away, practicing her tai chi chu’an form in the pale blue light of 6 AM. He rolled his shoulders, then clenching and unclenching each muscle in his body in slow, luxurious succession before deciding not to give her any trouble for not waking him.

Instead,he got up, walked over next to her, squared his feet like she had taught him, and extended his arms to quietly join her in her morning routine. 

-

They didn’t talk much as they gathered their things and left Hubris Comics, but the air didn’t feel tense between them. Things just needed to be thought about, and they did their thinking quietly as they made their way through alleys and past raiders and their tripwires to the familiar glowing entrance to Goodneighbor.

Yoshimi paused out front, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand to her brow, letting her eyes linger on the neon letters.

“Cap for your thoughts?” MacCready sidled up next to her, idly scratching Dogmeat between the ears with his right hand as the dog sat by his feet.

“I was trying to remember what I was thinking the last time I came here.”  
“Was it something along the lines of ‘I sure hope there’s an incredibly handsome super sniper in there that I can fall hopelessly in love with and whisk away to join me on adventures throughout the commonwealth’?”  
“I… hm… you know, I don’t think it was.”  
“Yeah, it was only a guess.”

Yoshimi let her arm fall to her side and turned to face him, her features simultaneously soft and cold, a switch in her demeanor that was starting to happen the longer she spent time with him. “Hey… before we go in there…” She trailed off, pausing to find the right words.

MacCready didn’t let her take the time, instead reaching up to brush a stray strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it delicately behind one ear. “It’s okay. We’ve got a world to save and our kids to bring home. We can worry about the rest of it later.” _Of course, now that I know the way your mouth consistently tastes slightly sweet, like bubblegum, resisting the urge to kiss you every time you even bother to look at me is going to be absolute murder._

She caught his hand with her own before he took it away and brought it up to her face, leaning her cheek into his palm before pressing a single kiss to it’s center. “And here I was worried about making you angry the whole walk over here…” _Not angry, he thought, just a bit sad, and a bit impatient, and a bit more distracted by the way that vault suit just… mmf._

She continued, “You’re perfect.”  
MacCready let out a self-deprecating snort followed by an uncharacteristically wide smile, “I know.”

Dogmeat barked as if to tell them to stop lingering out in the open making goo-goo eyes at one another. For once, all three of them were in agreement, and in the next moment they were filing into the Commonwealth’s foremost haven for ghouls, mercenaries, and wayward souls.

-

The Memory Den was a decidedly dark building, with a lot of plush seating and red lighting. Yoshimi felt suffocated as soon as they were inside but reminded herself that in feng shui, red was a color representative of goodness, luck, and fortune. _Good fortune in Goodneighbor,_ she mused, swallowing her distaste. Nick was just inside, waiting on a couch and thumbing through a particularly faded paperback. _Sherlock Holmes. Not surprising. I should ask him if I could borrow it once this is all over with.._ He raised his head slowly to look at her and MacCready and they did their best to look ashamed for being so late. Before she could even utter a word, Nick smiled at the two of them, mumbling, “Honestly, I thought it’d take you longer to get here.”

MacCready snickered. “You know the boss, we would have been here sooner but she can’t say no to fist fights with ferals.”

Nick nodded, “Going to make a note of that one. When Piper eventually writes her biography, “Fist Fights with Ferals” will make a great chapter title.”

Yoshimi waved a hand in the air between them and groaned, feigning annoyance, “Are you two done flirting or do we have a doctor to see?”

The synth detective took his paperback and dog eared one page before tucking it into the inner pocket of his jacket, replacing it with a pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out, lit it, and tucked it into a corner of his mouth before sweeping his golden yellow eyes over the duo one more time, “Let me lead the way.”

He walked toward the back of the large main room, shoulders hunched, and, with a slight haze of nervous tension, they followed.

-

Dr. Amari wasn’t an unkind woman, but she wasn’t the type to sugarcoat or give band-aids for boo-boos, and that was prevalent with the impatient way she responded to each of Yoshimi's questions. _I bet she’s annoying Yo and I bet Yo has no idea how much they’re actually alike_ , reflected MacCready as he sat, out of the way, in a wooden chair nestled in one corner of the stark white downstairs room. He was doing his best to not be a nuisance, to just wait and watch while she handled her business with Nick and the doctor. He fiddled with the small wooden carving of a toy soldier he kept in his pocket at all times, feeling increasingly nervous as their conversation drew long. He picked up bits and pieces from their hushed, harsh tones… _“connection”… “interface”… “Kellogg”… “could be dangerous”…_ his attention perked at the mention of the word dangerous and he looked up, only to find that Yoshimi was watching him out of the corner of her eye as Nick settled himself into one of the two strange jelly-bean shaped dream pods in the center of the room.

“What’s up?” He spoke, only to her, ignoring the other parties in the room with both his speech and his gaze.

Yoshimi turned all the way towards him, rooted in her spot, scowling in a particularly harsh way he hadn’t seen in weeks, “I’m going to use Nick as a… conductor of sorts… to travel through Kellogg’s neural pathways using the implant I pulled from his skull…” She sighed, over-sighed, dramatically and breathily, “…before we met.”  
“That sounds…”  
“Dangerous? Yeah, but there’s no other way.” She gnawed at the corner of her lip, lost in thought for a few quiet moments before letting out a low, strangled growl of frustration and tossing herself into the other pod's seat. “Things are never fuckin’ easy. I… I really don’t like the idea of traveling through his mind, I mean… I…” Doctor Amari shushed her and pressed a palm on the glass door to the pod, pressing down to latch it closed. Yoshimi made eye contact with MacCready for a brief moment before the pod closed and he wanted nothing more than to break it open, pick her up, and run far away.

But they both knew better, that they weren’t allowed to run from things anymore, and with that – the experiment continued.

-

MacCready spent the next twenty minutes pacing, ignoring Doctor Amari’s irritated “hmms” as he circled around Yoshimi’s pod. He couldn’t touch her but he could see. He could see the way her face contorted with emotion when she wasn’t fully present to mask her feelings. He could see her eyebrows knit together ever-so-slightly, could see the upturn of her bottom lip as she bit it. He could see that she was in pain, emotional or otherwise, but he couldn’t do anything and it was driving him crazy.

He was half-resolved to punch out the doctor and pull the plug when Nick’s pod hissed open and the synth stumbled out to talk to Amari a few moments before, ignoring MacCready completely, ambling out of the room to “get some air.”

“Why isn’t sh-“ He was about to ask when Yoshimi’s pod made a similar sound and she sat there, still, looking out, past him, past everything. Her mouth was a tight, hard line. She sat there for a few minutes, stark and unmoving, before mumbling slowly, “Shaun… he’s ten. He’s not a baby. Kellogg… Kellogg, I think, he seemed, almost, he was… he was happy I killed him the way I did, and… teleportation.”

MacCready slid down onto his knees in front of her, tucking two fingers under one wrist to check her pulse, looking over at Amari and hissing, “What the fu-heck is she talking about?” The doctor seemed prepared to give an equally harsh retort when he felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. _Yoshimi._

“It’s okay. I’m sorry. It’s not easy to be inside the mind of a person whose life you took.”  
“Are you… okay?”  
“Not really, but I know what to do next.”

Her voice had an odd affectation, like she was upset but boxing up her feelings and hiding them away somewhere. He was nervous about what would happen when those boxes inevitably had to be opened.

“The Institute has Shaun. He’s ten years old. We have to find a doctor named Virgil because… because… the only way inside is to _fucking teleport._ Where’s Nick?”

She pushed herself up, using MacCready’s shoulder to leverage herself before offering him a hand up. He shook his head and got up on his own, feeling useless in his inability to understand how she was feeling or to _even fuckin’ help her_. He swallowed his own anxiety in favor of a slow smile and steady drawl of: “He’s upstairs. Wanted to air out his circuits.”

She gave a terse nod to him, then to Amari. She idly patted Dogmeat on the head as she passed him in the stairway, her eyes still bouncing around the room as if they were unable to focus on anything solid. MacCready couldn’t help but worry, even though he knew that was the last thing she needed from him.

He sighed, waited a few minutes, and followed her up the stairs.

-

When he got up, she was alone on a red couch near the door. Her shoulders hunched forward as she sat, eyes closed, breathing with a slow deliberateness he knew to be one of her exercises for keeping “a calm mind.” He sat next to her and didn’t speak a word, leaning against the wall and fishing a cigarette out of his pocket to smoke while she centered herself.

Half the cigarette had turned to ash by the time she opened her eyes and turned to him. When she looked at him now, she really saw him. She was no longer looking into the past – not her own, not anyone’s – just him, then, in the dim light of the Memory Den.

When she spoke, it was with a high note of regret he had never heard from her before, “I saw his life. I saw everything, and, you know… he was horrible, but… things happened to him. Cause and effect. This world of yours, it’s so… so fucking harsh. I don’t know why any of you do it.” She was looking pointedly down at her hands. Clean hands, with short smooth nails and palms only starting to show wear from the wastes. MacCready put out his cigarette and reached over, taking one of them in his own – much rougher, calloused, a product of the world she couldn’t wrap her head around.

“Because what the hell else are we going to do, Yosh? You either live or you die. There’s not much more else to it.”  
“Nick left to go spend some time in Sanctuary. Said he felt a bit out of his own head after that.”  
“And now we’re supposed to find a way to survive as we go picnicing out in the glowing sea to find some Institute kook that can help us build a teleporter? No problem. I’ve totally done that before, dozens of times.”

Yoshimi chuckled, just slightly, just enough for MacCready to feel relieved that his stupid jokes might help make her feel even the tiniest bit better. 

She squeezed his hand once before letting go and pushing herself up to stand. She looked down at him over her shoulder and smiled softly, “No, not yet. Now it’s time for us to go find your son the cure he needs.


	12. med-tek

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Med-Tek and finally maybe some canoodlin'.

Med-Tek was _huge_. The upper floor and pointed antenna atop the sprawling medical campus’ main building was visible to Yoshimi and MacCready when they stopped to regroup five blocks away. They had walked in relative silence since leaving Goodneighbor. Yoshimi hummed a flat, low rendition of a Billie Holiday song she liked hearing on DCR to tune out how loud MacCready’s overwhelming silence felt. She knew he was focused, nervous, thinking, _ticking like a bomb ready to go off_ , and she also knew she wasn’t the best at comforting people with words. So… she stayed quiet, she walked, and she idly counted bullets in preparation for battle like someone in a different time might have counted sheep before rest.

Outside a broken down café – windows long gone, stools bent at odd angles, one singular booth available for them to duck into – Yoshimi stopped and grabbed MacCready’s hand to pull him in out of the street. “Hey – hey – we should make a game plan.” He followed listlessly, and when he looked up at her his iris’ were ringed with the faintest shade of dark turquoise, making his gaze more summer storm than spring afternoon. Yoshimi sighed, concerned, letting go of his hand to quick run through the small room, checking for traps or mines, before sliding into the open booth and holding a hand out to the opposite seat, inviting him to sit across from her.

He did, mumbling half-heartedly, “I don’t know if right now is the best time for a first date.”

“Stop it. You’re being weird. I understand why, but it needs to stop, now.” Her voice had an edge of strength to it, not unkind, but not altogether patient. MacCready’s mouth opened a little, to speak, to defend himself, but nothing came out save for a long, low sigh. “Right now. Three blocks ago. Yesterday. MacCready… _Robert_ … look at me.” She reached across the table and ghosted a thumb over his cheek, tucking her palm under his chin, cupping it, her eyes searching his.

“ _Sǐ mǎ dāng huó mǎ yī, aìrén._ ” Her voice was soft, as if the words she was whispering were holy. She watched a dark blush creep up his neck and pool, crimson, behind his ears. She pulled her hand away and brought it back to her own lap.

“You going to tell me what that means?” Even with his typical joking manner, his voice sounded gentle in her ears, like fingertips over paper. She smiled and shook her head. “No, not yet. Just…” Her eyes fell to the table and she could see her father’s face, imagined it’s reflection in the peeling Formica table top. He looked proud, or at the very least, he didn’t look disappointed. “It’s a gift. A… a promise of strength. Now, let’s go, okay?” 

She didn’t bother to tell him that that phrase, the motto her father taught her during her training, the words she held to in any crisis of faith or fortune… she didn’t bother to tell him that she had never even shared it with Nate.

-

Three blocks closer and they look up simultaneously as a Vertibird buzzes, low and loud, overhead.

-

One more block and they duck behind the crumbling façade of an old brick store front as two Knights in power armor stomp through the cross street.

-

When they were finally across the street from Med-Tek, hiding out of sight in a burnt out apartment building’s lobby, they saw it all. Dozens upon dozens of field scribes, knights, and other miscellaneous Brotherhood of Steel operatives marching to and fro with characteristic focus.

Yoshimi’s breath caught in her throat as she spoke, “We aren’t the first ones here.”

She looked away as MacCready scrambled to the far corner of the lobby and violently threw up.

-

The three of them – Yoshimi, MacCready, and Dogmeat – huddled in the most secure corner of the lobby, tucked between an empty Nuka Cola machine and a row of filing cabinets, all tensed and ready to strike at any moment in case a rogue BoS initiate wandered too close. MacCready was chewing pointedly on a stick of bubblegum to try and get the taste of vomit out of his mouth while Yoshimi racked her brains for a plan – any plan – to get them what they needed. 

Dogmeat, like usual, kept stoically watch, only concerned with keeping his people safe.

“Well, using a disguise didn’t really work last time…” Yoshimi grumbled, lowly.  
“An Assaultron is a lot smarter than your typical Brotherhood of Steel blockhead, though.”  
“Should… should we try it…? I mean, we have enough explosives for a distraction, but once we’re inside it will be impossible to avoid a direct fight. Trading ghouls for armored bigots doesn’t sound like a fight we can win.” Her voice took on a steely tone, her teeth clicking as she ground them together.   
“You really hate the Brotherhood…” MacCready trailed off, knowing he was speaking nonsense to get over the growing note of panic that was wreaking havoc in his stomach.  
“They’re just like the people who wanted to put me in a camp for being different before the war. I have no time for short-minded fools who have their heads too far up their own asses to even consider they might not have all the answers.” She hissed, her grip on one of her unsheathed combat knives growing white-knuckled.  
“Remind me to never get on your bad side. Okay, how about… use Dogmeat’s cuteness to lure a couple of the more stupid initiates into an alley a block away, take their uniforms, stroll in, get as far as we can without drawing fire, laying mines as we go for backup, and…”  
“We really need to add someone to the team that’s better at strategy than we are.”  
“No sh-uh-crap. Oh hey, hey, hey look!”

MacCready hit her bicep with the back of his hand and pointed. Walking by one of the buildings blown-out windows, away from Med-Tek’s bustling epicenter, was a duo of inconspicuous field scribes. “Come on, no harm in at least collecting their uniforms if we can’t think of a better plan.” He was crouch-walking away from her before she could even agree or disagree with his plan and Yoshimi decided that she preferred his current gung-ho take-charge demeanor to his defeated fear from an hour earlier, so… she followed.

-

They followed the scribes another block before MacCready hung back, positioning his rifle to take out the one walking on the left while Yoshimi tilted her body low to the ground, ready to simultaneously jump up and pop the one on the right with her 10 mm as he took his shot. A moment later, MacCready let out a quick, shrill two-note whistle that signaled it was time to attack.

The more perceptive of the two scribes began to turn his head toward the sound when a .308 bullet whistled through the air, through his skull, straight into a brick wall in front of the pair with a sharp crack. Yoshimi popped off a shot from her pistol and caught the other as he fell to avoid anymore unnecessary sound, pulling him out of sight into another of the endless abandoned apartment complexes dotting downtown Boston. Moments later MacCready followed, dragging his companion.

Dogmeat trotted into hiding behind them holding the handle of a silver briefcase in his jaw, setting it down gingerly and curling up in a far corner, out of the way as they frantically stripped the corpses of their uniforms.

Yoshimi grumbled with old-world distaste, “This is so disrespectful. Ah, _duì buqĭ_.” MacCready ignored her, too singularly focused on how much they still had to do after changing. He was a veritable tornado as he peeled off his jacket, shirt, pants, boots. The field scribe uniform was a little too big on his arms and rib cage – when he would normally make a joke about filling it out, instead he just zipped it up and shouldered his weapon without a word before turning to Yoshimi – and catching himself blushing all the way from his ears to his ankles.

She was naked save for her underthings, hopping on one leg as she tried to roll the slightly too-small uniform up her opposite thigh. She was cursing under her breath, frustrated at their bad luck and irritated by how _tiny_ the scribe wearing the uniform had been. She could hear MacCready’s smile in his words without having to look up when he asked her, “Do you, _uh_ , want help with that?”

She groaned, huffing as she finally got both legs in, rolling it up over her hips and pulling the rubbery material onto her arms, “RJ, I am not even remotely interested in having you help me put clothes on.”

“ _Soooo_ …” He arched an eyebrow, even though she wasn’t looking. 

“ _Shut up._ We’re going to go shoot every god damn Brotherhood fucker there is right now, full stop, we’re going to get what we need, and then I am taking this off before I _fuckin’_ suffocate.” MacCready could have sword he saw fire flick from the tip of her ponytail as she cracked her head back with a flourish after finally getting the zipper up and, despite the brevity of the situation, he couldn’t help but admire the way the suit accentuated _every single perfect, taut muscle in her body_. 

She checked her gun, reloading and buckling it to her belt as she rolled up her vault suit to tuck it in her pack. When she was fully settled and ready to proceed, she finally took the time to take in their surroundings better, exhaling with intense irritation. It was then that she noticed Dogmeat’s particular package.

“Hey RJ, what’s that?” 

He looked over as the shepherd let out a short, excitable yip.

-

“No way. No way. No WAY!”  
“ _Shhhhhhh._ ”

-

Inside of the silver case, nestled in a bed of thick black foam, was a dark red cylinder with a capped needle on the end. Printed on the cylinder, clear as day, was one singular word: PREVENT. Yoshimi wasn’t sure what was going on at first when he crouched over the case to open it, but when she noticed his hunched frame shaking uncontrollably, she neared, lowering herself to her knees next to him.

MacCready was crying, sobbing, big fat, wet tears. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders the best she could, whispering, “We need to get out of here, Robert,” as gently as she could.

She fell backwards onto her butt when he reached out, one palm pressed into each side of her face, gripping it as if it was the most precious thing on earth, and breathed the words “thank you” into a long, slow, salty kiss.

-

They sat on the bed, backs against the wall, passing a bottle of label free red wine back and forth in the same room at the Rexford they had shared their first night together. This time there was no sleeping bag on the ground, no tension between wary strangers. This time there was a celebration to be had (Daisy started crying when they dropped off the case and cure with her to deliver on her next caravan out of Goodneighbor – told them they were some of the good ones, even if they did buy a whole lot of bullets).

MacCready hiccupped, his face still red from the uncontrollable crying he continued to do the whole walk back to Goodneighbor from Med-Tek, his chest warmed by the wine they had been swigging for the last twenty minutes. He looked over at Yoshimi, “You have the best luck of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t know about that. The only lucky thing that’s happened to me since leaving the vault has been finding you.” She tilted the bottle to her lips, taking a long drink. The way she spoke when she responded was absolute, matter-of-fact, without a touch of romanticism. Despite this, MacCready couldn’t help but blush.

“I was ready to die. I was ready to go down in a blaze of bullets, in… in… in a fu-flippin’ firestorm, as long as I could get you out with the cure. And then… what? It falls into our laps? We just happen to strip the two field scribes secretly smuggling out the exact thing we were there to steal? That’s astronomical. That’s punch-an-assaultron-and-take-off-it’s-head impossible. Duncan’s cure is going to be on it’s way to D.C. in the morning. I feel like I can breathe for the first time in… in years. This can’t be real. This can’t be possible.”

Yoshimi laughed, light and loose like dice from a glass, “ _Sǐ mǎ dāng huó mǎ yī._ ”

“You gonna tell me what that means now?”  
“It means... it means that nothing is impossible.”  
“You said something else, though, another word, earlier… ah-ren?”  
“Aìrén.” Yoshimi had the decency to blush shyly, even though they were both sitting on a dirty bed in a grimy hotel, buzzed off of wine and sitting in their underwear and a pair of white t-shirts (“ _I need to get this fucking suit off IMMEDIATELY._ ” The second the hotel room door closed. MacCready avoided comment at that point.) “It means… well, it’s like… _my love_. A… uh…”

Yoshimi didn’t have a chance to explain herself further before feeling the touch of his hand on her face, sliding down to cup her neck, a thumb tracing along her jawbone, and then – a kiss. A hungry kiss, the kiss of someone who has recently tasted the sweet wine of freedom (and the sweet wine of grape). She couldn’t help but let out a short, surprised “oh” against his mouth and that made him press his mouth against hers just a little bit harder, just a little bit more urgently.

-

_Oh god oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck MacCready don’t fuck this up. Fuck oh my god she’s so beautiful._

-

_Is he… oh my god, are we… relax, Yoshimi, it’s not like it’s been 200 years since the last time someone touched you._

-

He broke away from her, using his thumb to press up against the underside of her jaw, forcing her to tilt her head back and open her throat to him. He kissed her – first, behind her ear, then, lower, lower, lower, until his nose was tucked into the hollow at the front of her throat and he could smell the mothy cotton of her t-shirt. He was curled into an awkward sitting position on the bed as she sat, legs out in front of her, still leaning against the wall. 

Pausing, he let himself breathe against her neck, their skin hot against one another, burning.

“Is this too fast?” He mumbled against her skin, “I… this is… ugh, you tie me up inside so I talk like more of an idiot than usual…” The hand he had against her throat lingered there, his thumb idly stroking the freckles dotting her skin. His other was bracing his weight against the mattress. “I just… this is important. You are important. I don’t want to fuck it up, by well, by, _fucking._ ”

Yoshimi’s voice was low, almost a purr, when she responded, “You swore again. I’m telling Duncan.” Before she even finished the sentence, she pulled herself up from under him and, with the grace only a seasoned martial artist like herself could muster, caught the front of his shirt in one hand as she pulled herself on top of him in a straddle without losing her balance. She hunched forward and pressed the wet, hot center of her body against his pelvis.

“I think he’ll forgive me that one.” MacCready couldn’t help but smile. Smile, grin, laugh – almost hysterically – at his _insanely fuckin’ good luck holy shit fuck oh my god._

Yoshimi responded by pulling her t-shirt over her head and throwing it onto the cracked wooden floor. The shade-less lamp on the bedside table behind her haloed her head in fluorescent light as she lingered above him, pulling her hair from it’s ponytail and shaking it out down her back.

MacCready leaned forward, pressing her further against his impossible-to-ignore erection as she legs wrapped around his waist. His hands were pressed, sweaty and flat-palmed, against her bare back. “You look like a fuckin’ angel.” He whispered in reverence.

“ _Language_ , Mr. MacCready.” Yoshimi giggled, leaning forward to kiss him.

And kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I plan on writin' some tried and true hardcore blush-if-grandma-sees-it porn in later chapters, but right now we're ridin' the feels train. Choo choo.
> 
> Also in case you guys haven't noticed, I do have her Luck stat maxed out in-game.


	13. naked, 4am

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's a Christmas gift to the people who actually follow this fic. I love you all.

MacCready _could not_ sleep.

He was too aware of the pressure of Yoshimi, tucked like a _fuckin’ present_ against his side. She was curled against him, sleeping soundly, one arm draped over his chest, palm flat over his heart. He was scared to move, scared to reach up and wrap his warped fingers around hers – hers, slender, serene, soft – afraid that if he shifted in the slightest it would all slip away into nothingness, _just fuckin’ poof_.

He squeezed his eyes shut and forced an exhale.

_her hips rolling against his like a wave mid-storm, intense, cresting white foam breaking against the rocks of the shore, of his shore, of his – oh my god how did she do that she’s holding me from the inside she’s fucking pulling me in even further she’s a fucking hurricane she’s a storm she’s so perfect so perfect so perfect oh my god – his pelvis, just rocking, up and down, his cock is the flagpole and she keeps raising and lowering the banner for the soldiers that will be lost in the war to come, the war of hearts, because every fuckin’ person we meet is going to fall in love with her and I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting for this and oh my god, she’s so warm so hot so hot so hot sohotsohotsohot_

His dick stirred against his thigh as pictures of their night together stirred in his mind, impossible to block out. He tried running through knock knock jokes to distract himself. Knock knock? Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? Orange… _orange_ …

_her hair, thick and dark, hung around them in waves, blocking out dusty light from an old bulb, flickering, hair that smelled like he imagined the old world smelled like (how does she do that?), the faintest oldest hint of unrecognizable sweetness, fruit, smoke, charcoal, blade oil, his hands are on her, tracing out pathways and maps to her most delicate places and she’s moaning oh god, she’s moaning and it’s his name and he’s doing this to her, pressing sweet against her, his thumb circling, surrounding, and she rocks against him and he’s up up up and his arms are around her waist and she has a handful of his hair in her fist, pulling, but it feels so good feels like freedom feels like a new beginning feels like oh god oh god oh fuck_

She stirs a little in her sleep, a soft exhale, hot breath rolling across his skin. He shivers, and she stirs again. His dick is so hard it hurts, but there’s no relief, and she really needs to sleep, he really needs to let her sleep. They have so much left to do, so much, so much…

_so much it’s too much, it’s been so long, it’s been since lucy, it’s been four years, he can’t tell her that can't tell her he hopes she’s the last woman he ever touches as she bucks against his hips, flat on her back on the dirty mattress, a mattress too dirty for a woman as perfect as she is, and he’s pressing into her, and he’s leaning down and their torsos are flush together and it hurts where their collarbones connect but he doesn’t let up, he presses into her, he wants to fold into her, he wants to never leave, and she’s so warm and so inviting and her fingertips play patterns on his spine like she's some fucking maestro and then she digs her nails into his ass, begging him to go deeper, go further, fuck her harder, and it’s too much and he can’t hold it back and he buries his face in her sweet fucking hair and he breathes so hot into her sweet fucking neck and he comes, and he comes hard, and he thinks she comes too but it’s all so much he can’t really tell he’s seeing stars shooting stars and his eyes go out of focus and she’s right there and he can’t help but let out a pitchy groan as his fingers clench and oh god he can’t feel his legs and he slips a little and lands on her and she laughs and she looks at him, oh god the way she looks at him all half-lidded eyes and sweaty heavy breaths and her perfect fucking breasts with perfect round fucking nipples like nuka cola caps and he just tilts his head against her and his mouth seeks one out and he just breathes against it, breathing, breathing, breathing, sighing, letting himself melt into her, around her, and she just… she laughs, soft and sweet and have-i-said-shes-perfect-already and... she just... she... she welcomes him home, as if she had been waiting for him all along_

-

Yoshimi can feel the hot tears pour down MacCready’s cheeks, silent and subdued, as he clutches her hand against his chest. She pretends she's still asleep. She gives him his moment.

-

He bites his bottom lip so hard that it bleeds, and he hopes that she doesn’t hear him, because he doesn’t want her to think he’s a wuss.

-

She doesn’t think he’s a wuss. She thinks she might love him, but she’s afraid of what the words mean, so she squeezes his hand ever-so-slightly and, lulled by the steady beat of his heart, drifts back to sleep.


	14. conversations on the road, vol. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just like volume one, except not.

“Hey Yosh, so, uh… did you sleep well?”  
“Oh, it was a _preeeeeeetty_ good sleep.”  
“Yeah, but, like, how good?”  
“On the sleep scale, hm… I’d maybe give it a 5?”  
“Out of 5 or out of 10?”  
“You’ll never know!”  
“Oh _come on_!”

-

“I wonder if there are still horses anywhere.”  
“Horses?”  
“Yeah, they’re… big animals, with hooves, and manes – and you ride them.”  
“Like a radstag?”  
“Kind of, but not really. Radstag are like deer. People used to hunt them just like they do now. Horses were more… beautiful?”  
“But you didn’t eat them?”  
“No.”  
“Sounds pretty useless, then.”  
 _Dogmeat whines._

-

“So why are we going all the way back to Sanctuary again?”  
“We really need to resupply – bullets, medicine – and drop off a lot of the more valuable materials I’ve collected – copper, silver, fiberglass… and I need to get my power armor because there’s no way I can get through the glowing sea otherwise.”  
 _Sigh._  
“What are you sighing about? You’re not the one who has to trek through a perpetual radiation storm to talk to a strange hermit doctor.”  
“Exactly. I don’t like the idea of you having to do that without me being able to come with. You sure you don’t have any extra power armor?”  
“We sold the other set. Nick’ll come with me. It’ll be fine.”  
“You don’t know that! You do-“  
“Shhh. It’ll be okay.”  
 _Grumpy sigh._

-

“ _Achoo._ ”  
“Do you have allergies or something?”  
“Aller-whats? No, I just sneeze when it’s really dusty, or when I’m around cats, or when it’s springtime. Sometimes I sneeze when I get too close to mirelurks, but I think that’s just a coincidence.”

-

“Hey, Yo, do you, uh, do you believe in aliens?”  
“What, like little green men? If they existed, they probably would have shown up by now, don’t you think?”  
“Yeah, I… I mean, I guess…”  
 _Obvious space ship streaks through the sky to explode in a fiery mess not far away._  
“Well, shit.”

-

“It’s been hours since we’ve shot anything. I’m getting sleepy.”  
“Want me to shoot you?”

-

“Robert James MacCready, _so help me god_ , if you keep randomly grabbing my ass I will stab you.”  
“Okay, Yoshimi, real talk: have you ever had, like, a good look at your ass?”  
“N…no?”  
“Then you cannot possibly give me crap for wanting to touch it constantly. It’s not my fault you have the most perfect ass this side of the universe.”  
“What about the other side of the universe?”  
“Haven’t had the opportunity to compare, sorry.”

-

“Did you get to see the Statue of Liberty when you were traveling here from the Capitol?”  
“Hm… no, it’s not there, you know. I know what you’re talking about – the big pre-war landmark? It’s been gone since the first bombs dropped, I think. I mean, it was an important symbol to people back then, yeah? Why would they let that continue standing?”  
“I… I guess I never thought of that.”

-

“I don’t think I was ever a great mother.”  
“Huh? Where did that come from?”  
“I was just thinking about Shaun. It never felt natural to me. I knew what I had to do. I had to feed him, and change him, and play with him. I loved him. I felt it, you know, that strange pressure in your chest when they smile at you or do something stupid for the first time but to you it’s amazing?”  
“I remember that. The first time Duncan sat up on his own without help was also the first time he really, really smiled at me because I got so excited by the first that it caused the second.”  
“You’ve got this… this thing about you. Like when we had to visit the school in Diamond City to drop off that file for Nick and the kids started asking us all those questions? You were… natural. Comfortable. I wasn’t.”  
“Yosh, you’re too hard on yourself.”  
“N-“  
“No, seriously, listen. You’re amazing. You do amazing things. You help people. You’re just… you don’t warm up quickly because you spend a lot of time thinking about what you do before you do it. That’s not a bad thing, it makes you… _well_ , you. When you focus on the fact that it was easier for me to answer their questions at first, you ignore the fact that they were hanging on your every word when you eventually spoke up to tell them about your hand-to-hand combat with a Deathclaw.”  
 _I love you._ “Th… thanks.”

-

“I… RJ… uh… you really didn’t have to do this.”  
“I wanted to try cooking for you for once.”  
“No, really. You really didn’t have to do this. It’s… uh… is that… _what is that?_ ”

-

“What am I supposed to do in Sanctuary?”  
“I’m sure Preston or Codsworth will have things for you to do, if you want to do them. You’re under no obligations to anyone so you could just sit and catch up on sleep and read the whole time if you wanted.”  
“Normally I’d be trying to get info on how to crack Med-Tek, so not having that goal leaves me kind of… I don’t know, it’s not a bad feeling, just a weird one. I want to feel helpful.”  
“There are dozens of tato plants that need watering, darling. You’ll figure it out.”

-

“Ugh, I hate camping on the road. The wind blows through these abandoned buildings like there aren’t any walls at all.”  
“Just go stand in the corner.”  
“Huh?”  
“I hear that they’re 90 degrees.”  
“ _Oh my god._ ”

-

“You can tell you’re a dad just by the way you tell jokes, you know.”  
“No you can’t!”  
“Yeah you can, they’re that bad.”  
“Do you know the main difference between bad jokes and dad jokes?”  
“No, what?”  
“The first letter.”

-

“You know, Yoshimi, I’ve been waiting months to say something very important to you.”  
“Oh, really, what?”  
“Something very important.”  
“I do-“  
“Get it?”  
“ _Ugh._ ”

-

“Hey Robert, what’s your favorite color?”  
“Hm… green, but not quite like my old shirt, more like… life? You know, grass in pictures where it isn’t irradiated, or some crops right when they’re their most perfect? Bright green. What about you?”  
“Purple, probably. Partly because there’s a certain rarity to it these days. You don’t see a lot of naturally purple things. Mutfruit can be purple-ish, and occasionally there are wildflowers here and there, but it’s… rare, and it’s rich and beautiful. It’s a comforting color, in a way. In feng shui, purple is representative of wisdom and quiet, too, which I like. Green is a perfect color for you.”  
“Yeah?”  
“It represents youthfulness, growth, and healing. It’s… characteristic, I guess.”

-

“How far to Sanctuary?”  
“I’m thinking it’ll be about four more days if we don’t have any more big distractions.”  
“Like the factory full of super mutants?”  
“Like all the factories full of super mutants.”

-

“Let’s just stay here forever.”  
“While there are few things I would rather do other than stay tucked in a sleeping bag, naked next to you until the end of the world, the sun is rising and with the sun comes the radscorpions.”  
“Dogmeat’ll get ‘em.”  
“Ha! This isn’t like you, Yosh.”  
“I know! You’re a horrible influence on me. A horrible… sexy… _naked_ influence.”

-

“Since I have first watch duty, do you think, uh, I could borrow your Pip-Boy?”  
“Are you seriously going to play through Grognak and the Ruby Ruins again? For the twelfth time?”  
“I still haven’t figured out the right series of commands to get the Icy Sword of Chrysanthus! Plus, it’s not like there’s a ton to do while sitting in the dark for hours on end.”  
“You got me there. Uh… do you… uh… do you want to know what commands you need to do?”  
“No! I’m not a cheater!”  
“You ju-“  
“Yoshimi, so help me god, don’t make me kick you off the overpass.”

-

“Hey, remember when I threatened to kick you off the overpass when you were trying to spoil the Ruby Ruins game for me?”  
“Last night? Yeah, I remember.”  
“Um… so… could you tell me what I need to do to get that sword?”  
 _Sigh._

-

“Hey, I was wondering… before, you told me you’ve met a vault dweller before?”  
“Yeah. Want to hear about her?”  
“If you don’t mind.”  
“Nah. Her name was Cupcake… ‘cept I doubt that was her real name, but it’s what she said to call her when she rolled up on Little Lamplight. She was the weirdest mungo – that’s what we used to call outsiders, adults, whatever – that I had ever met. She told me my face looked like a butt and somehow that convinced me to let her in. She had this ridiculous pink mohawk and she carried a combat shotgun that she also used as a melee weapon. She’d just… whack people over the head with it and then shoot their faces off. Kind of like a… less refined, more ridiculous version of the way you fight, in a way.”  
“Really?”  
“Yeah, but despite the fact that she was really brash and irritable and just plain rude, we all liked her. It was hard to get a bunch of kids who lived in the dark to like you, trust me, but she could dish it as well as she got it, so we helped her, and in turn she helped us. Left tons of canned food, some weapons. Got collars for the dogs so it was easier to tell ‘em apart. And then, she left.”  
“But you said…”  
“Yeah. I told you how once you turned 16 in Little Lamplight, you had to leave, right? Well, I turned 16 and went off into the wasteland, not sure what to do with myself. I was smart enough, and a good shot, so I got by. I came across Rivet City and there she was, just like she had been three years earlier – only, softer, I guess? Her hair was more grown out. She was nicer. She had a husband, guy named Butch, and they were doin’ things, but just not travelin' as much anymore. I stuck around, helped out, defended the city with the guard, and then Lucy showed up out of pure coincidence. We decided to try and make a go of things outside of Rivet City, and, well, you know the story from there… when Duncan started getting sick, well, sicker, with her gone, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have anyone except for… except for the vault dweller, so I went back a second time, and she took him in. Took us both in, in a way.”  
“She sounds kind. Not a lot of people out here would do that.”  
“Not a lot of people would have helped me get the cure for free, either.”  
“We’re not talking about me now, though.”  
“Yeah… yeah… she, Cupcake, ha, that’s such a ridiculous name to say out loud, but the last letter she sent, she told me that Duncan’s been learning to shoot gulls out of the air with one of the rifles I sent back with Daisy’s last caravan. Apparently he’s just as good a shot as I was when I was started out. She says he’ll be better than me in no time and, honestly, I’m happy. I sometimes think I should just not go back, you know? Let him be happy with them, but then she’ll say he asks about me and how I’m doing. You can only send so many letters saying you’ll have news soon.”  
“The next letter you get from them will be different.”  
“It will be… it’ll be the best thing I’ll ever have the chance to read, or, at least, I hope.”  
“Me too.”

-

“Dear lord, _what’s that smell_? RJ?”  
“It wasn’t me! It was Dogmeat.”  
 _Dogmeat whines._  
“200 years in the future and men still blame the dog when they fart.”

-

“Hey, what’s that over the ridge there?”  
“That’s Sanctuary! We’re almost there. Just one more night out in the open on watch duty. I can’t wait to get some uninterrupted sleep.”  
“I can’t wait to interrupt that sleep.”  
“Robert…”  
“With my naked body.”  
“James.”  
“You know, on top of your naked body.”  
“ _MacCready!_ ”

-

“I’m kind of excited to show you my cabin and my books.”  
“You have, like, what? Seven new ones to add to your shelves with the traveling we’ve been doing?”  
“Yeah. I know most people don’t care about that sort of thing, but it feels really amazing to be able to preserve that small piece of history.”  
“It will be nice to read some of them when we’re not forced to constantly, you know, shoot things.”  
“Even if we weren’t forced to, we’d still shoot things a lot.”  
“Yeah, probably.”  
 _Shoots at radroach 200 meters away._

-

“RJ, this is going to sound stupid, but...”  
“Yes, I’ll kiss you.”  
“H-how’d you… how’d you…?”  
“For once, _you_ shut up.”

-

“There are a lot of people to introduce you to back in Sanctuary. You’ve met Nick, obviously, but there’s Piper, Strong, Cait, and Curie. Preston sort of runs things while I’m gone. Deacon is sometimes around but he’s usually pretty busy with Railroad stuff. Oh, and Codsworth, of course.”  
“We’re so busy doing the things we do that sometimes I forget you’re both the General of the Minutemen and an agent of the Railroad. I can’t believe my girlfriend tells half of the Commonwealth what to do.”  
“Your _girlfriend?_ ”  
“I… uh… sorry?”  
“Ha, no, it’s okay, it just sounds kind of silly, all things considered.”  
 _MacCready blushes uncontrollably._

-

“Oh god, I think those mirelurk cakes were bad.”  
“Got the super-shits?”  
“Dear lord, do you have to be so… so… uncivilized?”  
“It’s the end of the world, babe, _nobody’s_ civilized.”

-

“I’ve started writing Yo-Yo Yoshimi and the Rolling String of Justice!”  
“Oh no, _not this again._ ”  
“ _She flung her super-sonic yo-yo out from the gaping sleeve of her kimono, hitting the evil Toy Rocket Man between the eyes, staggering him. With a flourish of her triumphant wooden weapon, Yoshimi spun, building momentum, around and around, before attacking again, walking the dog, and Toy Rocket man, straight to helllllll!_ ”  
“You should stick to sharpshooting instead of comic writing.”  
“Don’t stifle my dreams, Yosh.”  
 _Yoshimi blushes because she totally loved it, even if she pretended she didn’t._

-

“A few more miles and then we’ll be in Sanctuary.”  
“Can I admit something?”  
“Sure, what is it?”  
“I’m not looking forward to having to share you with other people after the last month of just us… and, well, Dogmeat, but he’s good company.”  
“Unfortunately, we can’t save the world all on our own.”  
“I know. I just… I… I l-“  
“Hey look, it’s Nick!”  
 _Sigh. Another time. When it’s right._


	15. sanctuary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We meet more of the gang. Smoochies. Power Armor. Strong being a mutant. Stuff.

“Hey, kid. The homestead’s been missin’ ya.”  
“Hey Nick. Are you feeling any better?”  
“Yeah. I’ll probably be heading back to Diamond City for a while to catch up on cases and check on Ellie. Y’know how she misses this old bag o’ circuits. Is that alright, or did you need me for anything?”  
“I’m heading out into the glowing sea soon, but I can take Strong just as well as you, so yeah, that’s just fine with me. He’ll probably relish the opportunity to punch some deathclaws, anyways. I don’t want to interfere with you and the lovely Ellie pining for one another from afar. Any updates, or did you walk out to meet us just for the hell of it?”  
“Just for fun, though Deacon’s in and he’s wearing a dress. Said Sanctuary was the only place he felt safe enough to practice walkin’ in heels.”  
“Sounds about right. We’re gonna head in, unload, and I’ll get around to updating everyone and introducing MacCready.”  
“You do what you gotta do, sweetheart.”

-

During their time traveling together, Yoshimi didn’t mention Sanctuary very much aside from once saying, “it’s the ruins of my old world home, so it felt appropriate to make it into something other than a pile of bad memories for the new world,” and occasionally bemoaning how long it’d take to get back there. As they neared and MacCready could see the massive wooden front gate built into a high wall of wood and aluminum flanked by two heavy machine gun turrets, he was nearly speechless – she had founded this settlement in the three months before she met him, and didn’t think it was worth mentioning often?

He shook his head in disbelief, wondering if she had a pet Mirelurk Queen she had tamed in her free time to introduce him to inside.

The gate opened slowly and a short “hey-o!” came from a guard post within. Dogmeat ran ahead to greet the people inside and he caught the slightest tired sigh pass from Yoshimi, on his left. He readjusted his rifle on his shoulder and echoed her sentiment – he wasn’t really looking forward to making the rounds with a couple dozen new people.

Especially new people that were probably all a little bit in love with his… his… with Yoshimi, in their own way. He couldn't really imagine anyone feeling otherwise.

-

Inside was just as impressive as outside. MacCready could see a half-dozen homes in various states of disrepair from his vantage point just inside, their holes patched and their windows replaced. There were signs out front with names painted on them: “The Longs”, “Preston & Sturges”, etc. 

To the right of the main entrance, on top of a concrete foundation (they must have cleared away a house that was too destroyed to repair and then worked from there, huh) there was a ramshackle two-story building, without a door, so he could sort of see inside – there were stalls lined up along the outer walls – small merchant posts, cots upstairs for the settlers that ran them during the day.

“You done gaping?” Yoshimi was standing, her face the cool mask he recognized from their first meeting, staring at him as she stood next to a particularly baby-faced man in a too-big-for-his-skull leather hat, holding a massive laser rifle, and… _oh he just looks like he wants to save the world starting with us two heathens, I bet. Keep your mouth shut, pretty boy._

“Uh, yeah boss, sorry.” He slipped into their familiar roles, shedding the comfort of the last month’s travel as he picked up Yoshimi’s cues. He awkwardly shifted his rifle from one shoulder to the other, suddenly particularly aware of how desperately he could use a real bath, how badly his breath must smell.

“Good. This is Preston. Tomorrow he’s going to introduce you to everyone after Strong and I leave for the Glowing Sea. Tonight we’re going to unload and get some rest. Despite his protests otherwise, I have told him that you and I have been traveling nonstop for almost a month and would like a moment to recharge before jumping into the mundane blah-ness of social and societal obligation.” MacCready nodded, tight-lipped, trying not to give away the fact that, at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to kiss the deepening scowl right off her face.

_Baby-face is looking at you, MacCready. Smile like a good boy._

“The general has told me that you’ve done a lot to help her, and in turn, help the Minutemen. For that I’d like to say we are all incredibly grateful.” MacCready made a mental note to teach Preston how to better hide his feelings when he’s obviously irritated, starting with ten different ways to swallow the telling dark red blush creeping up his neck, turning his taupe skin a rather telling shade of umber.

“Uh, yeah, no problem.”  
“There are plenty of open bunks in th-“  
“That won’t be an issue, Preston. MacCready will be bunking with me, in my cabin.”

MacCready couldn’t help but stare after her, grinning like an idiot, as Yoshimi turned on her heel and began stalking off down the road. Preston didn’t even bother trying to hide his surprise as he looked from her back to MacCready. “Uh… I… alright… well, then I’ll speak to you both in the morning…”

Yoshimi threw an arm up in recognition of his statement, still walking away. MacCready gave him a short nod as he jogged forward to catch up with her, not 100% sure what the power play he just witnessed meant, but 200% sure he _totally liked it_.

-

Yoshimi could feel eyes on her as she walked down the cracked main road running through Sanctuary. Seeking eyes, eyes belonging to people with questions, people with requests, people who all wanted something from her. She ignored them, feeling tense and panicky like an animal in a cage, staring forward, one foot in front of the other, until she got to her cabin in the back corner.

She didn’t even bother to look back at MacCready, even though she knew he was tailing right behind her.

When the door closed behind them, she let out a long shaky breath and turned, taking two fistfuls of his shirt in her small hands, pressing her face into his chest between them and standing absolutely still, waiting for her breathing to calm.

He would have stood there with her for as long as she needed, even if the walls were burning down around them.

-

“Sorry about that. I just… sometimes, once in a while, I get panicked. It happens more here than out in the wastes, funnily enough. It’s just this idea that everyone here needs me, expects me to fix things, to fix them, and they don’t notice that I’m just… I’m just a person. I have no idea what I’m doing, not really.”

Yoshimi spoke into his chest, her lips sticking to the cotton as they moved, not looking up. MacCready sighed, leaning his face down into her hair, “You’re not just a person. I know you don’t want me to say that, but you aren’t. I’ve said it before – you are different. You have… I don’t know, there’s just something about you, something… something from before. People are always going to, I dunno, stare at you a little longer than necessary, ask you for things that seem impossible just to see if you can do it, because you probably can. You just gotta learn that it’s okay to say no, or it’s okay to say you need time, or it’s okay to just… do whatever. You’re helping people more than most. Just… ah, sorry, I’m bad at this sort of thing.”

Yoshimi pulled her face from his chest, leaving behind three little damp circles in the fabric. She looked up at him and exhaled through a world-weary smile, “Yeah, yeah, I know. This whole thing would have been a lot easier if I was a huge heartless jerk, huh?”

“Yep. Shoulda just punched Preston in the face and told him to fight his own damn deathclaw the first time you met.”

-

Yoshimi’s cabin was the furthest from the busy merchant-medic-bar-hangout area in Sanctuary, so while not completely quiet, it had an air of “this is a private place, don’t come knocking unless necessary.” It was two stories, built on another cleared foundation, and came with it’s own personal generator and small water purifier. Yoshimi sheepishly admitted to MacCready that she had “pulled the general card” when it came to building her own private bath, even though she knew it was fairly luxurious. There was a main sitting area, a small kitchen with a bar and stools, as well as her bathroom on the first floor. The second floor was just one big bedroom with a bed, couch, bookshelves, desk, and ceiling fan. As far as post-apocalyptic homesteads went, it was a pretty nice one.

“And I thought it could be ours.”  
“Huh?”  
“Strong and I are leaving tomorrow, in the afternoon, after I run through all the reports Preston tried to assault me with when we first got in. I… I don’t spend a lot of time here, so despite all the amenities, it hasn’t really felt like home, and I thought if, when I’m away, you stayed here, lived here, made it… I dunno, more yours, that, when I came back, it would feel… warmer, more like a place where I belonged. I know this sounds stupid, but…” She trailed off, staring at her feet. They were still standing in the entryway, not having moved from where they stood when they first entered. MacCready looked at her, saw the strength in each of her finely tuned muscles, saw the power behind each word she spoke, saw the determination, the extraordinariness of her… and as she spoke, the coin flipped and he saw the weakness, the doubt, the way her eyelashes left tiny spiderweb shadows on her cheeks. _He saw her, and he understood,_ leaning down to place a chaste kiss on her downturned lips.

“Stop calling yourself stupid, stupid.” He took a step away, leaning down to pull his boots from his feet and slide his rifle from his shoulder, leaning it next to the front door. _God, this woman has no idea the power she possesses._ He placed his hands on his hips and, with an air of over-dramatic sensationalism, looked around, groaning, “Man, it’s good to be back home! Care to give me a tour, good lady?”

Yoshimi let out a strange laugh-choke-cry-sigh in turn, unable to resist the very _MacCreadiness_ of MacCready’s response.

-

“The water purifier attached to the cabin is a prototype, so it’s really only good enough for a bath every couple days or a few bottles of water a day because the pipes are kind of weird. It was one of the first things Sturges and I worked on together. He’s pretty excellent at building things, and I’ve found I’m a pretty great troubleshooter, so after this one we built the big one that’s out in the river and it’s served everyone’s needs well enough. That one is linked to a huge water-barrel-collector type thing they can siphon from for baths and stuff. This one uses a series of pipes we buried, all the way to the river, to bring it up here. We couldn’t figure out a way to do it with the other one, too much water pressure, but we’ll get there.”

-

“Sturges built the generator here, not me. Called it a Christmas gift. It was mid-November, though. He’s kind of eccentric. There are five more, bigger ones, powering all the lights and machinery in Sanctuary. They need near-constant maintenance but I’m pretty sure Sturges has taken Jun under his wing to help with that, helping him build confidence – losing his son really wrecked him. Probably doesn’t help that his wife is a miserable, mean bitch. _Oh god_ … don’t tell them I said that.”

-

“Near the entrance is the merchant building. There’s an armorer, guy who sells bullets, and so on. The people there change around because they’re sent by their caravans so they just stay in an upstairs bunk room. I don’t really know any of them that well, but Preston seems to. He’s like that, though. Further in is what I call the clinic. We have a medic in there with some cots, and the workbenches are all outside too. That’s where we all do modding and stuff, if I ever have time. Armory is out back. Sturges takes care of that. Let’s see… next to it, you saw that open air concrete plot? With the lights strung up? That’s sort of like our town square. Tables, a bar, lights, even a jukebox. Lots of people hang out there when there aren’t crops to tend to or things to fix. All the houses are open, the people who stay in them rotate save for the Longs, and Preston, Sturges, Sheffield, uh… Mama Murphy, the Vault-Tec guy, Rylee, Tina… I think that’s it? There might be more since the last time I checked in.”

-

“And lastly, here. My place… er… our place. Not a lot of personal charm, but there are my books and I found a stockpile of nearly untarnished sketchbooks at a paper factory that I’ve tucked away for the future, maybe for… for Shaun, I dunno. Anything you want to do, or set out, or whatever, go ahead. It’s your space now, too. Good pillows, blankets. Mama Murphy is a great knitter, it’s just hard to find enough yarn for her to do anything other than the occasional scarf or hat. She’s not, like, our actual mother… it’s more of an honorary title. She’s kicking a chem addiction right now, though, so try to be kind to her even if she’s weird. That’s about it for the tour. I can introduce you to the rest of the more helpful companions staying here tomorrow. Especially Cait. You’ll like Cait. She’s very punchy.”

-

MacCready watched her, sitting on the threadbare cushion of the dusty royal purple couch tucked into her… _no, our_ … front sitting area as Yoshimi stood, central in the room, with her arms out, finishing her verbal tour of the settlement. Her eyes were ringed in I'm-so-tired purple, but despite that and the way her shoulders slumped as she stood, he could sense the slightest hint of pride in her voice. Her hands fell to her sides with a low _thump_ and he got up, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his face into her neck in one quick movement, mumbling, _quite pathetically, you lame mungo,_ “I’m going to miss you” into the shadowed curve there. 

He was too busy kissing her earlobe to hear her whisper “me too” back.

-

Yoshimi was up with the sun, practicing her tai chi chu’an form in the front sitting room after nudging the coffee table out of the way and laying a ragged blanket down for her bare feet. MacCready hadn’t quite gotten a hang of getting up in the morning to practice every day, so he was still curled up on his side in the upstairs bed, snoring.

When she finished, she slowly packed her things. More bandages, Stimpaks, bullets, non-perishables. Oiled her blades, checked the straps on her harness, cleaned her gun. She cleaned her gun again. Oiled her blades again. Whistled some Frank Sinatra. Ate a single Fancy Lad Snack Cake. Regretted eating that single Fancy Lad Snack Cake. Cleaned her gun, just one more time, just for good measure. Checked the laces on her boots. Pulled the stitching out of the latest tear on her vault suit just to re-do it. Oiled the blades one more time. Brushed her hair out, brushed it again, continued to brush…

“I think you’re avoiding going outside because you’re scared of going to the glowing sea.” MacCready leaned against the banister for the creaky wooden stairs in nothing but his torn denim jeans, looking down at Yoshimi through a muss of hair still bedraggled from sleep.

She glanced up from her perch on the couch, her blade flat against one knee as she rubbed a cloth over it, grumbling, “I’m not scared of anything. _You_ should be scared of me stabbing you for being such an ass.”

“Relax, relax, I get it. I don’t want you to go, either, but I bet Preston is probably crapping his pants with anticipation just waiting to get you to answer his questions.”

“Okay, I might be avoiding him.”

“Thought so. Hey… _hey_ , come here.”

MacCready strode over and gently took the blade from her, pausing to sheathe it in her harness, laying on the coffee table, before holding a hand out to her. Yoshimi took it, feigning reluctance as she stood to greet him. Their lips met once, twice, then she pushed away, “I really need to get going.”

“Yeah…”

“Get dressed. You can bathe if you want. I’ll meet you at the entrance in two hours. Time to go face the music.”  
“Mm… or, and this is just an idea, you could bathe with me.”  
“You are a terror. First you remind me of my duties, then you try to get me to shirk them.”  
“I’m a man of many mysteries, Yosh.”  
“You’re a man of too many annoyances. Two hours.”

She smiled despite herself, holding up her pointer and middle fingers to punctuate her point before pulling her harness off the table, looping it over her body, securing it, and, with one last fleeting glance back at her lover, left the relative ease of the cabin to face the harsh light of day.

-

“Strong getting impatient. Where is Shee Mee? We have walking to do, blood to spill. Milk of human kindness might be in glowing sea.”  
“Relax, big guy. She’ll be here soon. Hey, Strong?”  
“Yes, Mack Ree Dee?”  
“Keep her safe for me, will ya?”  
“Shee Mee need no help to be safe but I will pull heads from all monsters that get near.”  
“That helps, buddy. Thanks.”

-

MacCready could see her as she left the building she had told him was called the clinic, stopping to talk to one settler, and then another. He watched as she stopped to scratch Dogmeat, lounging in the shade of an overhang, imagining her telling him to look after everybody for her. He was leaning against one of the houses near the front gate, but not quite at it, hoping to catch a moment with her alone before she left. He watched her check and double check the straps on her harness, on her belt, on her pack. He watched the slight shifts in her face as she cycled through emotions: anger, fear, resolve, doubt, certainty – before settling on “neutral.”

He saw her see him, saw the slightest hint of a smile, and he thought _damn nothing better happen to her while she’s out there._

_I can’t go through that again._

When she kissed him goodbye, it was quick and soft. She said she didn’t want everyone gossiping. He said he didn’t care but was only able to get away with one wayward grope before she was off, off again, off to save the world, off to save her son.

He watched her climb into her power armor, pat Strong on the back, and then he watched her walk out the gates, leaving him alone – in a new settlement, in a new place, with people he had never met before.

_Oh well, I’ve been in worse situations._

-

Yoshimi couldn’t look over her shoulder in the power armor, but if she could have, she would have, wondering _will I come back from this? Is this the last time I see all of them? Will the wastes swallow me up this time?_

-

Strong was almost giddy at the prospect of bashing in some skulls. He would have whistled a jaunty tune if only he knew any.


	16. the glowing sea/belonging

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six weeks pass: a story told from two perspectives. Dogmeat makes no appearance because I'm a jerk.

DAY ONE

**Yoshimi**

Yoshimi had always loved the quiet. She relished the ability to just sit and think, uninterrupted. Before the war, before Nate, before Shaun, before everything, all her favorite hobbies tended to be quiet ones. Reading in the soft glow of a low wattage light bulb, sipping cider out of a hand-thrown clay mug, practicing her tai chi chu’an just as the sun was cresting over the horizon to start the day, sitting in a bath with everything but her nose under the water, just _breathing_.

Walking down the main road out of Sanctuary with no noise save for the soft clunking of her power armor and the clickity clack of Strong using a bone ( _oh god where did he get that_ ) to pick at his teeth, she found herself wishing for the quiet to end. She found herself actually missing MacCready’s endless rambling.

_Not that she’d ever tell him._

**MacCready**

He stood there for the longest time, leaning against the front of one of the houses, staring pointedly at Sanctuary’s closed front gates, his arms crossed across his chest. He just stood, leaned, and stared in pensive silence until he was startled by Marcy Long stalking by, mumbling something about _“lazy no good loitering motherfuckers”_ under her breath.

He walked back to her… _no, come on you idiot, our, our, our_ … cabin, ignoring a few friendly beeps from Codsworth and what seemed like a surprisingly well-worded pick-up line ( _Are you an alien? Because those buns are out of this world!_ ) shouted from Deacon along the way. He just needed a minute to himself. He’d apologize later. Maybe.

Inside, he shut the door, leaned against it, and just inhaled. _Fuck, it smells like her in here._ Looking around, he found himself systematically touching and running his hands over everything, cataloguing it in his memory. The cool metal exterior of the refrigerator and the two unopened Nuka Cherries nestled inside. The unlit range, the large pot sitting on top of it, a ladle absentmindedly hanging from it's side. The bread box, empty. Each of the cupboards, mainly empty. A filing cabinet filled with various crafting materials: a small roll of wire, flakes of silver, circuit boards, various other science-y things he couldn’t wrap his head around. The lip of the cracked porcelain tub, the frayed towel ( _still damp, oh god_ ) thrown over the side. A tarnished hairbrush, a few thick dark hairs curled within its bristles. A small wooden box filled with bars of soap, wrapped in fabric ( _jesus the smell it’s her she must make it herself oh wow this woman can do fucking anything what is that smell don’t forget to ask her when she gets back maybe you won’t smell like sweat and balls all the time if you learn how to make soap yourself_ ). A few chipped, tiny glass bottles on the windowsill, catching the light and reflecting it in new shades of purple and green. The mirror, cracked, inside the mirror, tidy: a bundle of toothbrushes tied together with twine, three bottles of scavenged toothpaste ( _you should go to the doctor in diamond city to fix your fuckin’ nasty teeth sometime and maybe stop drinking all that cola not like that's good for you_ ), some unmarked chalky white pills in a dull brown bottle, a fork ( _why is there a fork here?_ ), three lighters, and a single black glass bead. Upstairs there was a wardrobe with a few unworn laundered dresses inside ( _she’d look ridiculous in a dress – beautiful, but ridiculous_ ), white t-shirts, a few surprisingly well preserved men’s flannel shirts, denim jeans, a plastic bag filled with fabric scraps, yarn, bags of needles and thread. A full sized bed, piles of blankets, three soft pillows, a Wakemaster alarm clock, a bedside table with a half full bottle of purified water and an unassuming leather book ( _looks like a diary, not going to look just in case_ ). Her desk, one of the previously mentioned sketchbooks closed on top ( _just a peek – empty_ ), drawers that he wasn’t comfortable enough opening.

And then, the bookshelf. He placed both his palms flat on it’s top – it came to about his belly-button in height – and slid them outwards to the edge, his arms stretched to their widest. He leaned his torso down against it’s top and sighed, pulling his arms back to his sides so he could crouch in front of it and read through the titles despite the intense wear and tear many of their covers possessed. _The Collected W---s of Sha---p—re, F-------t 451, Sher—ck H---es and the ---nd of the Bas------l-s, Rainier Mar—R----‘s D---- Elegi-s, and so on_.

He pulled one at random from the shelf, let himself fall backward onto his bottom with a soft “oof”, and opened to the first page.

WEEK ONE

**Yoshimi**

_It’s weird how every ruin becomes the same at the end of the world. Before the bombs fell, each of these buildings had stories. They were homes, businesses, churches, schools. They all had their own, individual meanings, their own individual purposes. Now all they’re good for is a night hiding from raiders, or a place to dig for stray bullets._

Days and days of walking with the occasional bout of ( _all together quite boring_ ) fighting and they were almost to the northern edge of the glowing sea. No huge obstacles yet, but Yoshimi had been feeling uneasy after almost three miles of walking in the brush without a single creature in sight. It was too quiet. _She could feel it._ Deathclaws were about.

She didn’t bother telling Strong about her suspicions because he’d just get excited and start yelling with weird, blood thirsty glee, and Yoshimi didn’t want to draw any predators their way unnecessarily soon.

****

**MacCready**

He spent the first three days inside the cabin, reading poems from a book by someone named _P---O N—uda_. He had never heard of Po Nuda, or _whatever the hell his name is how can I tell when the cover is so burnt to shit_ , but something about his words on the yellowed page stirred something inside of MacCready’s gut. MacCready didn’t consider himself a particularly intellectual man, but he couldn’t help but feel a strange visceral pleasure when he read them, over and over, until he knew them by heart ( _just like I used to do with the library at Lamplight when I was a kid_ ). Words like:

_That is why when I heard your voice repeat_  
_Come with me, it was as if you had let loose_  
_the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine,_  
_the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:_  
_in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,_  
_of blood and carnations, of rock and scald._

Four days after she left, he took a bath, changed into a clean pair of denim jeans, pulled on a faded flannel shirt from the wardrobe, and went outside to finally introduce himself to everyone ( _I don’t need Preston’s help to god damn say hello_ ).

WEEK TWO

**Yoshimi**

Her face burned. _Fuck, it hurt so bad._

She should have said something when she sensed that things were too quiet. She would have if MacCready had been there, she would have said, “Stop yammering and pay attention. Can you feel that? Everything is so still.” She didn’t, though, because the quiet wasn’t that bad and Strong wasn’t much of a conversationalist ( _and neither are you, might as well fuckin’ admit it_ ), and then there was an Alpha Deathclaw barreling at them with no regard for their current state of mind or armor.

The helmet to her power armor went flying and she took a massive claw to the face before she was able to readjust herself in the suit and swing the gauss rifle she had carried _just for this god damn mission even if it’s stupid and slow because fuckin’ Sturges claimed it was so damn powerful_ by it’s strap from her back to her front. By then Strong had already cleaved an arm and a leg off the creature and was grappling with it while foaming at the mouth and screaming about “glory to mutant kind.” 

It only took a couple more shots to take it down, but she’d have the scar for the rest of her life.

The helmet was fucked, but the rest of her armor was lead lined and she had enough Rad-X and Rad-Away to keep her from getting too irradiated. 

_I’m going to be sick the whole god damn walk home if I keep going through the Rad-Away at this rate._

Strong had butchered the Deathclaw while Yoshimi was busy bandaging and Stimpak-ing herself. He didn’t even notice her new facial wound when they started traveling again because he was too excited about the helmet he had made out of it’s skull, tied around his head with some gut string like the morbid, fetid trophy it was.

**MacCready**

He hated to admit it, but he kind of liked being a part of a community like Sanctuary. You got up, you occasionally took a bath, you ate, you wandered around helping, tinkering, talking. In the last week he had learned how to properly fertilize a field, how to throw knives at targets (albeit not very well, much to Cait’s irritation), how to stand very still for a very long time ( _oh you are so kind monsieur MacCready merci for helping with l’experiment_ ), how to fire a laser rifle, and how to sit at a table with half a dozen different people playing cards and not have it turn into a gun fight.

The only part he didn’t like was night time, for a split second every evening just before falling asleep, where he’d see Yoshimi’s face in his mind and wonder how she was doing, praying that the answer was _just fine_.

WEEK THREE

**Yoshimi**

“Okay, let me get this straight: I have to kill an unkillable robot, decipher and undecipherable code, build an unbuildable machine, and then teleport into a facility with the best security known to man?”  
“Yeah, that’s about it. Oh, and if you don’t mind getting me the cure to my, ah… _little problem_ , while you’re there, I’d really appreciate it. I mean, all things considered, it’d be pretty damn rude to take all this information and run without doing that tiny little favor. Just, ah, just saying.”  
“Are you always this pleasantly passive aggressive?”  
“No, I used to be a lot worse. I’m out of practice after all this time living in a cave in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere.”  
“Point taken.”

**MacCready**

The caravan driver came in just like any other, with a loaded Brahmin and a look of never-ending weariness etched into the dusty crevices of his face. What was different about him, however, was the fact that as soon as he had his Brahmin tied up outside Sanctuary's market building, he started asking, “Hey, any of you know a guy named MacCready? Got a message for him. Daisy’s been sendin’ word with every caravan comin’ up this way, so… get him for me, will ya?”

He didn’t have to wait long before MacCready came bounding towards him as he leaned against the side of the market building, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. “Got a light?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. So, you have a message? From Goodneighbor? From Daisy? Codsworth said…” MacCready was bouncing on the balls of his feet without even realizing it. His whole body felt equal parts numb and electrified with nervous energy. Daisy. Goodneighbor. Urgent message. It could only mean one thing… 

“Yeah.” The caravaneer took a long drag on his cigarette, taking a _particularly fuckin’ annoying holy shit guy get on with it_ pleasure in his small power play. “Said your kid’s all good. Said she got a letter from pound cake or cup girl or whatever her name was, said sorry she opened it but she was excited, said she’d hold the letter in Goodneighbor but yeah – your kid, he’s all healthy or whatever. The cure you sent worked, I guess? Like I said, she’s been sendin’ the message with every caravan comin’ up here making sure you’d get it so don’t be surprised if you hear it a few more times in the next couple days. Anyways, uh, you interested in sellin’ that lighter?”

MacCready tossed the gold-plated flip lighter he was holding at the guy’s chest before wheeling around on his foot and running back up Sanctuary’s main road. He was yelling, flying, running, running, running to anywhere, running to _everywhere_. He had so much energy built up in his chest, in his limbs, in his whole _fuckin’ body that he felt like if he took the time to jump he’d just soar right on up into the sky_.

That night he bought everyone in Sanctuary drinks, enough to get nice and red-faced, even Preston, _the annoying little goody two-shoes_. They all drank, and drank, and shared stories about their lives, laughed, drank, danced, drank and drank some more.

It was only when he stumbled back to the empty cabin, kicking off his shoes and sinking into bed listening to the comforting hum of the generator out back, did he feel a small weight of sadness in his chest. He wanted so badly to have been able to share that evening with Yoshimi, so badly it hurt. He sighed, smiling despite himself, and said aloud: “I really need to tell her that I love her as soon as she’s back.”

Then, the smile still a whisper on his lips, he fell asleep. The caravaneer from earlier shared his happiness, laying in his bunk and dreaming of all the caps he’d get from the free lighter _that stupid idiot just threw at him like it was nothin’_.

WEEK FOUR

**Yoshimi**

“Yeah, Strong, I know super mutants don’t need to be cured to be, uh, whatever it is you said there, but Virgil is different than you and that’s okay.”

It was the fourth time they had had the conversation since leaving the gloomy cave at what felt like the end of the world. Strong had been repeatedly complaining about the “no good mutant hating head-should-be-stomped googly eyed doctor man” for days on end and Yoshimi was half-ready to throw herself onto a radscorpion just to end her suffering. She kept herself from slipping too far into the throes of her irritation by focusing on solid things, definable facts, instead of her feelings.

She counted how many packets of Rad-X she had left. She counted how many packets of Rad Away she had left. She counted how many times a day she felt nauseous. She ran through a list of food she liked before the war ( _sashimi, roasted beets, plums, angel food cake, jalapeños with cream cheese, sashimi, roasted beets, plums, plums, plums_ ) and ran through a much shorter list of food she liked after the war ( _none of it, really_ ). She made plans as to how she was supposed to kill a courser without getting killed herself. She wrote, rewrote, and edited the imagined speech she’d give to Shaun when she finally got to see him again. She listed all the ways she was going to tear her _no good fucking helmetless garbage uncomfortable too fucking heavy god damn power armor_ apart when she got back to Sanctuary.

Finally, in the quietest recesses of her mind, she counted all the times she thought of MacCready throughout the day, and the number was _high_.

****

**MacCready**

In an act of uncharacteristic exuberance following his _incredibly fucking good news_ from the previous week, MacCready had agreed to go check on a nearby settlement that needed some help fending off some persistent mole rats that had been destroying their crops. What he hadn’t agreed to was Preston also asking Deacon, who he had systematically been avoiding every time he dropped in since the merc’s first night in Sanctuary.

They walked to Abernathy Farm, the settlement in question, in relative silence. Deacon spent the whole time humming an irritatingly off-key rendition of Rocket 69 and MacCready was convinced he was doing it on purpose, just to irritate him.

Once they arrived, they were surprised to find that the mole rats had already been taken care of by a different passing group of Minutemen, but that the farmers really appreciated their _help blah blah blah this was a waste of time_.

If MacCready was irritated on the way out to the farm, he was _mega irritated_ on the way back.

“Okay, dude, let’s talk.” Deacon suddenly stopped short half a mile from home, hands in his pockets. “The Yoshster likes you, huh? You make her feel all sparkly and sing-songy inside. That’s cool, that’s cool. I don’t see the appeal but everybody’s got their thing. You’ve been avoiding me because you’re scared I’m going to tell her you turned us down when we asked you to join us as an agent leavin’ off holotapes at dead drops because _there weren’t enough caps in it_. Look, don’t worry about it. I get it now, all that stuff with your son. I still think you’re an ass, but you’re no longer king of the asses.”

MacCready sighed, reaching up to adjust his hat on his head, scratching uncomfortably at his neck, “I… uh… thanks, I guess? I was only avoiding you because you’re annoying, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Yeah, cowboy, no problem.” Deacon responded, completely ignoring the insult, “I’m totally going to tell her we’re cousins, though. Twice removed. Aunt Doris’ insta-mash has never been the same since she became a ghoul, don’t you think? She must have changed the secret ingredient.”

WEEK FIVE

**Yoshimi**

_Fuck, I miss home so much. Shit, I just called it home. Weird. Ugh, my face itches. I miss MacCready. I miss MacCready. I miss running water. I miss MacCready. I… ugh._

****

**MacCready**

_I am going to kiss her so hard when she’s back. God, she should be back soon. Shouldn't she? I’m starting to get antsy. It’s unnerving to be in the same place for so long, to sleep in the same bed. Oh my god, I’m going to kiss every part of her. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her ears, her arms, her fingers, her palms, her wrists, her waist, her collarbone, her neck, her hair, her… heh… her… other places._

****

**Strong**

_Strong starting to think milk of human kindness is not actually milk. Blood instead, maybe, or Nuka Cola._

HOMECOMING

She hadn’t showered in almost six weeks, her hair was a matted bun stuck to the back of her neck, her face was covered in a thin layer of pungent grime, and her breath smelled like deathclaw jerky, but when MacCready saw Yoshimi jump down from her power armor just inside the gates of Sanctuary, he couldn’t help but drop everything and run to her, scooping her in his arms and shamelessly spinning her around and around and around.

She was too tired to pretend she didn’t like it and just circled her arms around his neck, tears of exhaustion running clean lines through the dirt on her face as she buried it against the curve of his jaw.

He carried her in his arms back to the cabin as she hung, limp, and they didn’t say a word to anyone before letting the door shut behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem in question is Pablo Neruda's Love Sonnet VII, in case you were wondering.


	17. recovery/reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I tried to write smut, but it's definitely not my skill set. Smut wrapped in a cute little feelings bow.

Their first kiss after the door closed was a homecoming. Their second kiss an inquiry, their third a commitment. When MacCready gently set Yoshimi’s feet to the floor, she slumped to her knees with a groan, leaning her head down low and pulling her hair from her bun, mumbling, “I don’t feel that great.”

“I’m going to run a bath and get you some more Rad-Away. Just… just stay right there, okay?”

Yoshimi nodded, just a tiny flick of her head up and down, looking up at him with the faintest hint of a smile ghosting her lips. When she spoke her voice was so low it barely registered: “I love you, you know.” MacCready had been two large steps away and stopped, frozen with surprise at her declaration, turning his head, “I… ah… oh…” his voice tapered off to a soft whisper as he saw her, still kneeling, already fast asleep, her head leaning against the coffee table.

“I love you, too.” He murmured to the quiet room.

-

Yoshimi awoke fifteen minutes later to the sensation of being enveloped in warmth. She blinked once, twice, slowly, before she noticed two things: one, that she was in the bathtub with a Rad-Away IV hooked to her arm and two, that she was naked. “Hey, u-uh…” MacCready stammered, awkward, peering at her from under the brim of his hat as he sat perched on the closed toilet lid adjacent to the tub, “I tried waking you but you were so tired that I decided to just take your suit off, hook you up to the IV, and get you in the bath so you could relax. I, uh, I’m sorry…”

Yoshimi’s gentle laughter, _oh my god I missed that more than I realized_ , soft like wings in flight, cut through the awkwardness. “It’s okay. It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.” She used one arm, the one that wasn’t attached to the IV, to rub at her face. The grime there was too caked on for her to clean it properly with the use of only one hand and she huffed with irritation.

“Hey, Robert?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Want to, uh… want to join me? I could use some help…”

 _You don’t have to ask me twice._ Before Yoshimi even finished her sentence, his boots were off and his pants were in a heap on the floor. MacCready stumbled over one of his socks, causing Yoshimi to laugh harder before grimacing and whispering, “My face hurts…” He paused, completely naked save for a dirty white t-shirt, standing in front of her with a sharp upside down v of a frown on his face, “I wasn’t sure what to say about it at first, because I didn’t want you to be self-conscious, but… I’m so sorry you got hurt and I wasn’t there to help, and… you look fu-flippin’ beautiful, Yosh. I know you don’t need me to tell you that, but, yeah.”

Yoshimi looked up at him and, despite the tenderness of the moment, couldn’t help but laugh more at his scrawny legs and the way he was holding his underwear balled up in his hand, “Get in here already. I’ll scoot forward.”

_I’m the luckiest man alive._

-

It was more than the temperature of the water that was leaving MacCready red behind his ears as he slid into the tub, careful not to knock Yoshimi’s IV out of her arm. He found himself simultaneously speechless and filled with the desire to _just talk endlessly_. He sat behind her, his back against the porcelain, her small body nestled in the place between his legs, facing away from him.

At first he was tense, nervous despite himself, glaringly aware of the way his erection pressed into the small of her back ( _you try sitting naked with the woman of your dreams pressed against you and keep it down_ ), but Yoshimi could sense the tenseness in his muscles despite the exhaustion clouding her mind and she eased his discomfort by leaning the back of her head onto his shoulder, tilting her head to the side so she could whisper against his skin, “Wash my hair… please?”

 _Your wish is my fuckin’ command, you beautiful wasteland angel. Holy shit._ Yoshimi passed MacCready a bar of her special soap and, the both of them slipping into the familiar comfort of silence you can only find with someone you’re very close to, he began to rub it against his palm to create suds, reaching his hands up to run them through her wet hair. She leaned forward and away from him, pulling her knees up to her chest and tilting her head forward so he had better access.

He could count every vertebra in her spine at that moment if he had wanted to. He could have catalogued the small series of scars on her right hip from a particularly adventurous baby bloatfly, or the white stretch marks arcing over her lower back and abdomen from childbirth. Instead, he just quietly ran his fingers through her hair, letting his mind buzz with a content blankness as he took in the _her-ness_ of the smell, of the moment, of the entire situation.

When her hair was completely clean, Yoshimi pulled the IV from the crook of her arm and let it fall to the ground next to the tub before leaning back against MacCready with just a little bit more weight, just a little bit more purpose.

-

_Just touch me already. Don’t make me ask, you idiot._

-

It started innocently at first. He continued to wash, focusing on her back as she borrowed the soap and rubbed it on her face, scouring away weeks of commonwealth grime. At some point his hands ventured around her waist and then he was cleaning her abdomen, tracing his fingers gently along the pronounced lines of her muscles, trailing up along her ribs until he stopped, briefly, below the small swell of her breasts. He leaned his head forward, into her hair, nuzzling his face through to get at her ear, her neck, any place of damp exposed skin he could press his lips to.

She responded by pushing back again, his erection a heavy weight between her lower back and his pelvis.

“ _Yosh…_ ” He groaned into her ear. His hands cupped each of her breasts from behind and he ran a curious thumb over her right nipple. She shivered, just the tiniest bit, involuntarily but _so sweetly that he could barely fucking handle it_. He was burning under the weight of their quiet exchange, but found himself more interested in giving her pleasure than anything. He pressed further, letting his hands wander down her abdomen once more before he stopped, his left hand splayed flat against the flat plane of her lower pelvis, lingering just above _her unbelievable fucking heat_. He whispered, running his upper teeth against his lower lip as he leaned into her, “Can I-“

She cut him off, responding by letting out a breathy sigh and bucking her hips against his fingertips. He slid his hand down and began to rub, gently, feeling her body move against his as he circled his fingertips around her nub, _just like the trigger on your gun, gotta be gentle_. Yoshimi hadn’t said a word, but he could feel her, could feel the way her muscles tensed and loosened in response to his movements, the way her breath would catch _so fucking perfectly_ in her throat. The more she pressed back against him, the more difficult it was to be gentle. He started rubbing harder, using his palm instead of his fingers, his mouth on her neck, his breath heavy and hot, rolling over her skin, _damp, wet, burning, so hot, just so fucking wet, so fucking welcoming and wanting and…_ he had no clue how long he had been touching her when she finally clenched and shuddered against him, his name a prayer on her lips as she pressed herself fully against his hand one last time, damp, spent, sighing languidly.

The first words she spoke since they got in the tub together were fairly simple: “Fuck, Robert, _I missed you so fucking much._ ”

-

The bath finished rather innocently: a dozen or so chaste, tired kisses, the insistence that “it was okay, you don’t need to reciprocate, let’s just get you to bed, shut up, oh my god, you're so cute”, laughter over a shared towel, and a naked walk up the wooden stairs to the bed (“Oh! You washed the blankets recently! Did you do that for me?” followed by a “Uh, no, what? What are you talking about? Huh? I definitely didn’t do that. Only a dork would do that.”) ( _He totally did that._ )

They curled in their bed together, nestled like spoons in a drawer, and shared stories of their time apart. Yoshimi couldn’t help but shed a few tears when she heard of Duncan’s health and MacCready couldn’t help but laugh until he choked when she tried to emulate Strong’s voice when he yelled at the various deathclaws they came across. Yoshimi smiled when she heard about MacCready helping Preston train some of the settlers on their sharpshooting and she sighed when she heard about him getting into a yelling match with Marcy over how she treated everyone. MacCready hung on every word of every wasteland story Yoshimi shared, ignoring the roiling nervousness in his stomach each time her stories turned dangerous. They laughed, whispered, joked, kissed, and sighed with reckless abandon.

Hours passed and they grew tired, drifting in the sweet grey space between slumber and wakefulness as they tangled their limbs together. Before sleep fully took him, MacCready worked up the courage to ask the question that had been gnawing at him all evening, “Hey, Yosh? Do you remember what you said to me before you fell asleep earlier?”

She responded with a short, one-note snore. She was, of course, asleep.

_One of these days the time will actually be right. Until then, I guess we have a courser to kill._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My husband's suggestion for how this chapter should have went: "he could, like, jerk off, but right when he's about to cum on her face he yells 'I'LL GIVE YOU SOME RAD-AWAY RIGHT HERE' and, then, boom, jizz."


	18. the CIT ruins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cue me trying to write fighting and drama. Cue me crying because I have no idea what I'm doing.

Finally free from the constant pressure of worrying about a potential attack and trading watch duty with a super mutant who got grumpy if he didn’t get enough sleep, Yoshimi was out for 16 hours before she woke the next morning. 

In an act that she would call indulgent, that Preston would call irresponsible, and that MacCready would call awesome, Yoshimi decided that they weren’t going to leave the cabin for at least another full day. When a few settlers came knocking shortly after sunrise, she slipped downstairs with a blanket wrapped around her like a woolen cloak, answering the door with a cough and a “sorry, guys, but I’m still feeling a little off from all the radiation so you’re going to have to go to Preston for whatever you need today.”

When she came back upstairs and stood at the foot of the bed, dropping the blanket to the floor and climbing over a mound of discarded sheets and clothing before collapsing (with a giggle) on top of MacCready as he lounged, reading, he couldn’t help but say a quiet prayer to the gods of _giving the attention of fucking amazing women to worthless sad saps_ as he wrapped his arms around her naked waist.

He said the prayer a half a dozen more times in his head, rapid fire, as she cooed a lascivious “let’s fuck” into his ear.

-

 _And they did_. On the bed, against the kitchen counter, bent over the bookshelf, on the floor, on the couch, on the stairs, against the edge of her desk, in the empty bath tub, _that one time with the mutfruit_ , in the full bath tub, and in the bed one more time before night fell and sleep welcomed them into it’s loving embrace – because, boy, were they exhausted.

The next morning real life couldn’t be avoided anymore: it was time to suit up and head out. It was time to travel into downtown Boston and kill themselves a courser.

-

“You ready to go?”  
“Yeah, all packed. I just need to pick up my rifle from Sturges on the way out, he borrowed it yesterday because he wanted to add some mods to it that he said I’d like. That guy’s amazing, you know – he’s constantly going like some jetted up molerat, but it’s just because he’s SO EXCITED about building stuff. It’s awesome. I’m kind of envious, to be honest.”  
“I know exactly what you mean. If I had one tenth of his enthusiasm when it came to being the General of the Minutemen, I’m pretty sure I would have saved the entire country by now.”  
“The entire universe, probably.”

-

It didn’t take long for Yoshimi and MacCready to slip into the familiar machinations of traveling together in the Commonwealth. Their only handicap was the lack of Dogmeat; Yoshimi didn’t want to risk the pup’s safety in a situation so out of her control – especially with all the rumors and rumblings about how difficult coursers were to kill. The shepherd only whined a little bit before Deacon enticed him away with offers of raider throats and radstag steak, waving the pair off at Sanctuary’s gates.

It had been more than half a year since Yoshimi left the vault and she was starting to feel time slipping away from her. Their focus was singular, and her steadfast attention to detail and dedication to staying on target ( _“No, MacCready, we’re not stopping at the Super Duper Mart just because there might be one undamaged box of cookies inside."_ ) had them standing in the courtyard at the CIT ruins just a short week and a half after leaving Sanctuary.

Dusk was falling but she was hyped on adrenaline and Nuka Cola, fiddling with the radio on her Pip-Boy as MacCready scoped out rooftops for any potential thread. “Got it,” she mumbled as a soft beeping sound starting emanating from the device’s speakers. “Virgil said we just have to follow this beeping until we find the courser, and then, you know, kill it and pull its robot brain out.”

MacCready groaned, irritated, into the stock of his rifle as he stood next to her, watching for threats through his scope, “I’m nervous about this, Yosh. Maybe we left Sanctuary too soon. Your face is still all itchy and sh-stuff and…”

“Damn it, Robert, have some fucking faith in me.”  
“That’s not it! I-“  
“I know,” Yoshimi sighed heavily, “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just tense. It’s too late to stop now and I just want to get it over with. You have the laser pistol Sturges built you, right? If we get inside anywhere, you won’t have range so you’ll have to just back me up with that and the grenades.”  
“Aye aye, boss. I’ve got it all ready.”  
“Isn’t it kind of weird when you call me boss now that we’re… we’re…”  
“Boning? Kind of, but I like it. Come on, let’s get out of the courtyard. We’re like sitting ducks out here.”

-

They crouched into a nearby alley, finding themselves uneasy about the overwhelming silence of the huge looming U of a building around them. The silence was broken by the quiet, steady robotic beep coming from Yoshimi’s pip-boy, taunting them like the dangerous heartbeat of an unseen monster.

“Okay, let’s just… follow it, but we’ll have to stay quiet because I don’t want to turn the volume up to notify any raiders that are lurking about.”

Yoshimi sighed, unsheathing one of her combat knives from her back holster and peeking her head out from the corner of their covered alley. “Hey, wait a second.” MacCready mumbled, getting closer to her, sliding his laser pistol into his belt and slinging his rifle back on his shoulder. Without another word, he reached up behind Yoshimi’s head and pulled the elastic holding her hair in place, causing her dark hair to spill down her shoulders and upper back.

“What are y-“  
“Shhh, okay?”

He circled behind her and ran his fingers through her hair, pulling it down through the gap in her knife harness. She huffed with impatient curiosity, but crossed her arms across her chest and looked forward, keeping watch, trying not to make any sounds that would give away how good it felt to have his hands in her hair. 

_What was that one Po Nuda poem, that line? Hm…brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you were burning inside, under your skin the moon is alive… god, she’d probably make fun of me if I actually said any of this to her out loud._

His fingers were deft and quick, weaving the dark strands into a single thick, dark braid ending between her shoulder blades. He pulled the elastic around the end and looped it once, twice, nice and tight before impulsively sweeping it aside and placing a quick kiss on the exposed skin on the back of her neck.

“Your hair would have fallen out of the ponytail and gotten in your way during a fight like this one. I… figured this would be easier for you to fight with.”

Yoshimi was taken aback by the thoughtfulness, the _intimacy_ of the gesture, but she didn’t quite know how to say thank you. _Has anyone ever given this much consideration to your wellbeing before? Never, not since before your father died…_

“How… how did you learn how to do that?”  
MacCready rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, a pink blush making the planes of his high cheek bones glow, “Uh… while you were gone with Strong, Piper was in Sanctuary for a couple weeks, and, I, uh, I asked her about it. How I could… ugh, never mind, come on, let’s go, let’s go.”

Yoshimi’s smile reached the corners of her eyes and beyond, straight to her heart. “Okay, yeah, let’s go.”

She kissed him once, sinking into it for a single moment before turning on her heel, crouching, and, with newfound determination, leaving the relative safety of the alleyway. _You need to learn to say thank you better, Yoshimi. You need to find the words before it’s too late._

-

The beeping led them through one wing of the main CIT building, down some stairs, through a dozen or so easily dispatched raiders, along the waterfront, through a few side streets, and ultimately, to the battered front doors of Greenetech Genetics.

MacCready tightened the strap on his sniper, sliding it downwards behind his back as he took out his laser pistol. Yoshimi unsheathed one blade – the right one, secretly nick-named Brutus (the left one was Stabby, she never claimed to be great at naming things) – and positioned it blade-down in her left hand, her faithful 10 mm in her right.

They shared a quick, stiff nod and a brief moment of eye contact, her gaze screaming _it will be just fine, let’s go_ , his pleading _don’t hurt yourself please don’t hurt yourself_ , before she bit the proverbial bullet and shouldered her way in through the front door. 

-

The building was filled with half-dead Gunners. The ones that weren’t already on the floor were in various states of “almost-dead”. They made their way through the doors, broken consoles, and bodies with relative ease. 

On the second floor, a voice – some Gunner lieutenant or another – let them know ( _his voice is weirdly familiar, I think I know that guy, huh, probably one of the assholes I used to work with_ ) through the building’s intercoms that the courser was on it’s way to the top. 

On the second floor MacCready traded the laser pistol for a nicer, modded, laser rifle – smaller than his sniper, but more capable of packing a punch than the other option. He was fairly certain he’d need the extra fire power.

On the third floor, they came across a group of Gunners huddled in what appeared to me a small cafeteria. They opened fire on the duo immediately, but Yoshimi dove in head first, spinning and slicing with the fervor of a hacked Assaultron. At the end of the fight, MacCready noticed a wild look in her eye as she stood, straight-backed, with a smear of blood across the bridge of her nose.

On the fourth floor, things were quiet. _Too quiet._

When they got to the fifth floor, they felt the whole building shake, shudder, and subsequently settle. “Missiles,” Yoshimi groaned, growled. MacCready just stayed quiet, trying to keep the growing panic in his chest from overwhelming him ( _what if it happens again what if it kills her what if I lost her I can’t let that happen I can’t I can’t I can’t_ ).

On the sixth floor, they stopped to collect themselves. Yoshimi considered washing the blood from her face but decided against it – not wanting to waste the time. MacCready tried his best to remember the tai chi breathing exercises she had taught him – in, out, in, out, in, out – knowing he was better than this, wasn’t such a baby, _what is going on with you man, just get in there, keep her safe, get it done_. When they stepped into the final elevator, (“The courser is on the seventh floor. All Gunners report up here immediately”) he grabbed her hand and gripped it so tightly he could feel the heat of the blood pooling in his fingertips.

When the elevator doors opened, they barely had a chance to react. The courser’s head snapped up, it’s brow furrowed, and in one swift motion it put a bullet into the lieutenant’s head, let out a soft “ugh” and _turned fucking invisible_.

-

Yoshimi, always the faster one, was out of the elevator with a start. The room was small and tight, one round pathway circling around an open center, a railing around the inner circumference – a tall gated structure in the middle gave minimal coverage from gunfire. MacCready jammed his elbow against the DOOR OPEN button and brought the laser rifle to his shoulder, hiding behind the small space on the side of the doors, ducking his head out to see the best way to give cover fire.

He watched Yoshimi, graceful as ever in the dance of death, constantly moving through the space in order to avoid the potential blow of her invisible enemy’s weapon. MacCready, his heart pounding in his chest, _where the fuck is he where the fuck is he where the fuck is he_ , kept ducking in and out of cover to attempt to pop off a shot that _fucking hit anything_.

-

Yoshimi did her best to stay calm despite the way each and every muscle in her body completely tensed. The room grew quiet around her. _It’s teasing me. It’s fucking with me. It knows I don’t know where it is._ She breathed in deeply and heard it – the softest click of a bullet going into a chamber – and before she could give it a second thought she ducked low, sweeping her right leg out and curving her torso to slice the air with her knife. It caught flesh, not just air, and she could see a thick electric blue liquid starting to seep out of thin air. She felt the warmth of laser fire as MacCready took a few shots at the now-visible target.

_Huh, I didn’t know stealth boys worked like that – and also, mental note, some synths bleed._

It was enough to give her an advantage. She ducked and rolled to the right as the courser swung his shock baton through the air angrily. When she popped up and spun to face it, wielding her knife defensively, she expected to have a split second to lunge and attack it again before it completely recovered from the gash to it’s abdomen.

What she didn’t expect was the feeling of a cold, dark hand closing around her throat.

-

“ _Aghhhhhh!_ ”  
“Yoshimi! No!”

-

“Hey! Over here, you synth piece of garbage! Hey!”

The stealth boy worn off, MacCready could see the courser turn it’s head towards him, it’s face completely neutral as it threw Yoshimi forcefully to the ground and strode his way. _Oh shit, oh shit, I didn’t think this through, oh shit it’s going to kill me and then kill her and then fuck fuck fuck oh shit I can’t fight one of those things this close like she can but she’s too weak right now if I don’t do something oh god it’s so close oh – oh – oh there’s one thing I can do_. 

His last thought before pulling the pin on the grenade was the way her hair felt earlier that evening, soft, so incredibly soft, softer than anything he’d ever felt before.

-

“Wake up! Wake up so I can fucking kill you myself for taking such a stupid fucking chance, so help me god, Robert.”

-

“ _Please._ Please wake up.”

-

“ _Please. I love you. Please… oh god. Please._ ”

-

He felt warm. Hot. There was light everywhere, bright, blinding, welcoming in a strange otherworldly sort of way. He couldn’t hear anything save for a low perpetual buzzing. His chest heaved as he pulled in a breath – _ah, that really hurts, shit, am I alive, or am I dead, if this is heaven, heaven smells like shit._

He took another breath, and another, each one slightly easier than the last. He closed his eyes tightly, focusing on the breathing, and the buzzing, breathing, buzzing, breathing, buzzing.

“Oh my god, you’re… oh jesus, you fuck… you _fucking fuck_!”

 _She’s in heaven with me? She shouldn’t be here. She should be there, alive, alive, alive and okay. Is she okay?_ He tried to speak but his words caught in his throat and he started coughing violently, causing pain to shoot through his ribs and down his spine. He barely registered the sound as Yoshimi collapsed to her knees on the dirty tile floor, running her hands over his body searching for wounds she may have missed earlier, mumbling to herself in rapid Chinese, acting out of panic rather than purpose.

“H…hey, Yo…”  
“It’s been fucking HOURS, you… you just, you just pulled the pin on the grenade when he got close, and… and…” She let out a singular loud, hysterical laugh, “Who fucking does that? Both of you! I could ring your neck for being so reckless. You could have died! You could have… I would have been fine… I can hold my own, I would have, you… you… and now, you’re… you… your…”

Tears poured relentlessly out of her eyes. She seemed surprised, like she didn’t know what to do with such a sudden outpouring of emotion as she leaned forward, clutching at his tattered shirt with one hand, sobbing. MacCready closed his eyes again, feeling the comforting weight of Med-X flowing through his body ( _she must have patched you up, just like you did for her, everything comes full circle, doesn’t it_ ), his mind hazy. _He felt strange._

He went to reach up and stroke her cheek, run his thumb along her jaw, comfort her as best he could. He lifted his left arm, feeling suddenly dizzy, and when he went to reach for her he realized... _that his hand was gone_. There was nothing but a round stump, covered in maroon rags, damp, different, wrong.

“ _Your hand. The grenade just blew up in your hand._ ”

MacCready passed out again.

-

When he woke up the next time, he was laying in a cot in an unfamiliar room. The walls were brick and he could see a stiff, straight-backed man in a lab coat shuffling around in his periphery. His mind was hazy from Med-X but he could hear the sounds of people milling about, footsteps, voices, _her voice._

“Are you sure you can build it, Tom?”  
“Yes-sir-ee, I can. You just gotta find me the space to do it and we can get you into the Institute without a problem. We’ve got the blue prints from the chip, we’re good to go!”  
“Okay. There’s a settlement without any settlers I cleared out a while ago, it’s to the west, in the space where an old drive-in movie theater used to be. Lots of flat, even ground. Should be perfect. We need to get this done immediately, do you understand?”

Another voice joined them, sounding annoyed, “Whisper, it isn’t your place to be giving orders around here.”  
“Shut _up_ , Des. I don’t have time for any of this. The institute is filled with some of the best scientific minds in the country, right? Maybe… maybe I… maybe they… look, I want this done immediately, and that’s that. Get it done.”

-

When he heard her walking over to him, he closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. He heard her ask the lab coat man how he was doing.

“He’ll be alright. The wound is cleaned and bandaged, he’s pretty out from all the Med-X we’ve been pumping through him. He didn’t lose his dominant hand, so he could even learn to shoot again, though probably not with guns quite as big as that one. The only reason the thing didn't blow him completely to pieces is because it was leaving his hand as it exploded and the... the [i]courser[/i] must have been grabbing for it or something. I'm not sure, to be honest. Can't complain, though, he's alive after all.” Lab Coat jerked his head towards MacCready’s rifle, leaning against the wall. The merc opened his eyes, just slightly, watching Lab Coat stalk off, leaving him and Yoshimi alone in their corner of the large room. She strode over and sat on a cot next to his, reaching out and taking his right hand, _the one that didn’t get blown off, apparently_ , in both of her own, running a thumb back and forth across the calloused skin, staring down at her own feet.

_She looks so tired. She must have carried me the whole way here, wherever we are._

She mumbled, oh-so-quietly, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Death follows me. It always has. I was _so scared_... I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have… I… I’m so sorry. I… I love you, Robert. I’m not good at these things, at words, I… I’ll tell you properly, soon. I love you.”

He licked his lips, dry, cracked, and, despite the soreness, spoke, “I love you too, Yosh.”

The surprised squeak she let out when discovering he was actually awake was worth the excruciating pain he felt as he laughed at _how fucking cute it was._


	19. the institute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Working through some things. Big stuff happening. Blah blah blah.

_Shen Shu leaned against the glass-paneled front door of the corner store he ran a small corner of one of Boston’s numerous suburbs. A cigarette, hand-rolled, hung from the corner of his mouth as he stared ahead tiredly, bemoaning the lack of business he’d been facing since a recent anti-Chinese rally took place in town. People were afraid, their fears were getting the best of them, and despite having been a fairly well-respected figure in the community for years, those fears were starting to get to his bottom line. Nobody stopped by for a coffee or a chat just in case one of the wrong people saw them talking to him._

_He worried about Yoshimi endlessly. He knew she was being bullied in school, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it without making more unnecessary waves for her. He took a drag from his cigarette, breathed deep, exhaled with a sigh._

_It was 3 PM on a Tuesday afternoon. When his daughter Yoshimi, eleven years old and red-faced, came around the corner of the shop and ran toward him, he was startled into dropping his cigarette onto the concrete. She crashed into his side, tears spilling down her face, and he barely had a chance to react before she started speaking rapid-fire, “Some boys said they were going to come throw rocks through your window because you’re a dirty commie and I told them that that was rude and they pushed me down and said I should go back to where I came from and I told them I came from Boston and they threw dirt at me and called me names and I just… I just ran. I’m sorry, daddy, I… they were so mean and I didn’t know what to do so I ran and Mrs. Miller is going to be really mad that I left school during recess, but my knees were all scraped up and… and they were laughing and... I just... I ran! I hate them! They’re all so mean!”_

_He choked back the desire to cry, to yell, to call up the school and demand that someone pay for his daughter’s anguish, but instead Shu Shen crouched down and wrapped his arms around her, leaning his forehead against one of her bony shoulders and pulling her close._

_“We must not hate others for their prejudices, because it makes us just as wrong as they are. Instead, do you know what we must do?” Shu leaned back, still crouching, one hand on each of Yoshimi’s shoulders, his eyes searching hers._

_She sniffed and rubbed a palm against her damp cheek, “No, what?”_

_“We must eat ice cream. Come on, little bird, let’s go inside.”_

-

They had been living in Railroad HQ for almost two weeks and Robert James MacCready was going _insane_. The first few days he was coming down off of his Med-X high and drifted in and out of peaceful dreams about warm food and warmer bodies. Then Deacon came with a stack of paperbacks from Yoshimi’s bookshelf and tossed them on MacCready’s lap with a smirk and a sly, “Let me know if you need a hand with any of those.” The doctor wouldn’t let him get up and do much because, aside from the hand, he was still going through a cycle of treatments to repair skin on his torso, arms, and leg from burns, so… MacCready read. And read, and read, and after another couple days he had read everything and there was nothing to do but watch.

So he _watched_.

He watched Yoshimi, flitting about the room like a hummingbird in a flower garden, whispering low with one person, pointing out something for another, constantly casting guilty side looks his way. _I wish she’d stop doing that. I mean, yeah, this whole situation sucks, but it’s going to suck a lot more if she starts treating me like some useless fucking puppy. She’s got a world to save, doesn’t have to… agh._ His stump itched, it itched _so fucking bad_ , but the doc said he shouldn’t scratch it or disturb the bandages. He’d sometimes rub it’s soft edge against his upper thigh as a way to “itch-without-itching” but that just brought a strange, dull ache all the way up his arm and along the side of his neck.

_She’s been so busy she’s barely talked to me. What is she even doing? Fuck if I know. No one talks to me. I just sit here like a fucking mailbox. Or a nuka cola machine. That’s out of nuka cola._

_..._

_Fucking useless. Can’t even snipe anymore. Shoulda just left me there._

-

“Hey Robert, you sleeping?”

MacCready’s eyes opened slowly as he stifled a yawn against the back of his hand, pushing himself up into a sitting position on his cot. Yoshimi was perched near his feet, running her palm over a swath of his blanket over and over, idly trying to flatten it, not making eye contact.

“No. What’s up?”  
“It’s done. The device. To get to the Institute. Teleportation. I… I’m going tomorrow. It’ll probably be a few weeks between getting to the drive-in, sending me in, getting me back, and getting back here. The doc says your skin’s okay now but your body is still readjusting to all the… to… to everything, so I think you sh-“  
“I’m not staying here.”  
“Ro-“  
“ _Will you stop it?_ ” MacCready’s voice came out harsher than he had intended, the hard edge of it leaving a visible look of hurt on Yoshimi’s face. He found himself unwilling to back down, however, continuing, “ _I didn’t die in that building, so it would be nice if you stopped acting like it and actually looked at me. I'm right fu-flipping here._ ”  
Her brow furrowed and her eyes flitted up to meet his and in that moment, in that look, he regretted letting himself get to anger at all. _Jesus she looks so fucking sad and tired._ “Yosh, I… I’m sor-“  
Her face was a neutral mask, cold, collected, just like old Yoshimi. Like the woman he met in Goodneighbor half a year prior, not like the woman he fell in love with, “No, you’re right. I just don’t have time for this right now. I’m making the trip to the Institute tomorrow. Glory, Deacon, and a few others will be making the trip to the Drive-In with me. Tom’s already there. We’re leaving first thing in the morning. If you’re coming with, make sure you’re ready.” She pushed up off the cot and stood, facing away from him, lingering at the foot of his bed for a moment before shaking her head ever-so-slightly and walking away.

_God, Robert, you fucking idiot._

-

Yoshimi barely talked to MacCready on the entire trip to the Sunset Drive-In. She felt the weight of the silence between them, felt his eyes on her with every step, but she just didn’t know what to say to him and did her best to swallow the way it made her feel; like a comet speeding toward the ocean, afraid of burning up and drowning at the same time. There was too much running through her head, too much to worry about, and she hoped, prayed, that at the end of it all he’d be able to find some understanding.

_I’m just trying to figure out what to do if I find Shaun and… ugh._

MacCready strode slowly, his joints achy from the weeks of rest, his sniper hung on his shoulder more out of habit than function, glaringly aware of his inability to fight with each step. He could hold the laser pistol, but it just felt weird and wrong, and every time he brought what he thought would be his opposite hand up to help steady his gun, he was reminded of his handicap as his bandaged stump bumped against the metal. _Things are really not going my way. Handless and heartbroken. I’m not the only one she’s not talking to, though… she’s not talking to any of us._

He wanted to grab her hand, stop her, pull her close, tell her to stop silently shouldering all of the worlds problems, to just let him get close, let him be there for her, let him help. Instead he just walked, silent, eyes watching for predators, mind buzzing with unsaid words.

Deacon hummed the whole way, but it was more tuneless than usual. _Even he feels the tension in the air._

-

They could all see the device for almost a mile before reaching the drive-in. It was a huge, buzzing hulk of electricity and metal attached to an antenna, control system, and three large generators. As soon as they were within shouting distance, Yoshimi’s voice called out for the first time in days, “Come on, Tom, let’s get this over and done with.”

Tom called back an “aye aye” while Glory and Deacon set up perimeter defenses and MacCready just… stood there, dumbfounded.

Tom flipped the first switch and a high pitched beep came from the console. MacCready started walking toward Yoshimi, slowly. Tom flipped the second switch and a low, steady buzz started emitting from the antenna. MacCready started jogging. Tom flipped the third, second-to-last switch. MacCready ran the last few steps to Yoshimi before she got onto the platform, grabbing her hand with his good one and spinning her to face him, his face red from the exertion. He ran his hand up her arm, along the curve of her shoulder, up to cup her face. 

“Robert, this isn-“  
“Yosh, _please_. God, we cut each other off a lot these days, don’t we? Just, give me a second here.”

Yoshimi found herself reaching out to touch him despite her best efforts to stay unemotional before entering the teleporter. She reached a hand up, clutched at the lapel of his singed leather jacket, her eyes apologetic as they searched his face. Everyone else focused extra hard on the tasks at hand, trying their best not to eavesdrop.

“Okay, look, I know things are weird for us right now because the world is going to sh-sh-ugh, whatever, the world is going to shit, and we’re in the middle of it all, and…” MacCready reached up with his thumb to wipe away a singular tear forming at the corner of her eye, “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. Just… whatever happens in there, whatever you find, know that you are strong. You are so much more than you realize, and… and I’ll be here when you get back. I’ll wait. Right here. For you. You will be okay. I… I love you.” He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth, nervously chewing on it as he raised his eyebrows and met her gaze with a ferocity he hoped she understood. 

Yoshimi reached up to her face, cupping her hand against the back of his, tilting her head to kiss his palm before leaning forward and pressing her lips against his, slowly, with purpose. She closed her eyes for a moment, let out a long, steady exhale, and whispered, “I love you, too. When I come back, maybe… hopefully… well, one of these days we’ll get everything right again and you can teach Shaun how to shoot. I _will_ make everything right again.” 

The smile that spread across her lips in that moment was sad, as if she didn’t really believe the words she spoke but decided to say them anyways. _She can’t possibly ever be more beautiful than she is right now._ MacCready wanted to pull her to him again, kiss her, keep kissing her, kiss all the problems away, kiss her straight on until forever, but he knew he had to let her go. His hand dropped. She turned toward the platform.

“Wait, Yosh… here.”

He held out a small wooden toy soldier to her, most of it’s paint worn away by time and touch. He reached forward to tuck it into one of the small leather pouches on her belt, trying his best not to get embarrassed when he needed her help to zip it closed because he couldn’t do it one-handed.

“It’s my good luck charm. It… I’ll tell you it’s story when you come back, safe and sound. Because you will. Come back. Safe and sound.”

She smiled at him one more time, soft and sweet and perfect, before stepping onto the platform and closing her eyes. He could imagine her mentally running through her tai chi chu’an as the electricity running through the platform made her nervous, the buzzing growing deafening around her. He could see it in the way her hands twitched ever so slightly at her sides. He could see it in the way she watched him with a forced frown, he could feel it in the way he wanted to jump in after her to keep her safe.

Tom whistled. The machine buzzed. Then, with a sudden burst of neon blue light, she was gone.

-

It was white. So white. Yoshimi stumbled out of the teleporter into an empty room with a console and _whiteness_ everywhere around her. She took a deep breath and it smelled clean but _wrong_ and she found herself dizzy from the trip. She was leaning against a desk with a palm to her chest trying to steady her breathing when a voice came over the speakers inviting her upstairs, inviting her in.

She found herself wary, nervous even, but strangely unafraid.

She followed the voice’s instruction.

-

MacCready paced around the teleporter as dusk started to fall. He didn’t respond when Deacon offered him something to eat without so much as a joke, didn’t blink when Tom turned on the large construction lights to keep the area visible, didn’t stop moving when Glory had to gun down a few mole rats that wandered too close.

_How long will she be in there? How long will it take?_

He was prepared to pace all night if he had to.

-

She walked, slowly, from one too-clean room to another, sliding her palm along the sleek walls, ignoring the pressure of her heart pounding in her chest. When the final door opened and she saw Shaun – ten years old, behind glass – her breath caught in her throat so quickly that a high-pitched wheeze came from her mouth, alerting the boy. She took a step, another, forward, toward the door, but couldn’t open it, couldn’t get it to budge, couldn’t…

“Who are you? Where’s Father?”

“Me? I’m, well… it’s going to sound like a lie because you’ve never seen me before, but… I’m your mother and I’ve come a long way to try and find you.”

The boy shrieked, started panicking, pressing his palms against his ears and shaking his head, “No! Father! Father!”

Yoshimi stumbled backwards, trying her best to keep her emotions in check so she could properly think, but she was struggling. When a door next to the boy’s chamber slid open and an elderly man walked out, when she saw his face and the distinctive way his lips tightened in a small v of a frown at the boy’s yelling, _just like her father used to_ , she fainted.

When she woke up, she was in the same room, sitting in an oblong padded chair, the old man sitting nearby in a wheeled chair he must have brought in while she was out. The boy – the yelling boy – was standing quietly, his arms straight at his side, his eyes closed. Yoshimi blinked and cleared her throat, struggling to keep her thoughts straight, “You’re Shaun.”

The man allowed a small, indulgent smile to grace his face. “Was it so easy to tell?”  
“You look a lot like my father.”  
“You don’t look happy to see me.”  
“You’re old.”  
“Despite all the advances we’ve made, unfortunately, aging still happens.”  
“What the _fuck_ is going on?”  
“Language, mother…”

He trailed off at first, but with a slight cough against the back of his hand he began to speak. As he spoke, Yoshimi felt bile rise in her throat. Each word pouring from his lips was like an ice cube, cold, floating in a pool of beliefs that Yoshimi could barely believe. _We are better. The surface is beyond saving. Synths are nothing more than a tool. My father’s death was an unfortunate circumstance. We are better. We are better. We are better._

In that moment, she could see her father on that cool spring day when she ran home from school. She could see his face, and how sad he looked when she told him about the bullies. The ones that hated her because she was different, because _they thought they were better._ The memory of ice cream, vanilla, lingered in the back of her mind, the memory of a taste a whisper on her tongue.

The man in front of her may have had her father’s face, but he was not her son. _He couldn’t be, not really._ The culmination of a truth that had been chasing her, guilting her, pounding at the walls of her mind like a violent ghost for her entire journey in the commonwealth finally came: she felt no connection to the man in front of her. _She felt nothing._ Even if she had given birth to him, he was not hers. The commonwealth had taken him, the Institute turned him into something unsaveable. _Her son, her Shaun, had died many years ago, before he ever had a chance to really live._ She felt a strange, acidic anger bubbling in her chest at his disregard for life, his callous assumption that because she was his mother she was his to manipulate, as if she was stupid just like he thought everyone on the surface was. Her hand twitched at her side, suddenly all she wanted to do was take her knife and put it to his throat. _I am a horrible mother._ She could never help them, she could never let the Institute stand, not as it was, not as an entity that did nothing but inspire hate and bigotry throughout the commonwealth. She couldn’t… couldn’t…

“Do you understand, mother?”  
“Huh?”  
“I asked if you understood what I was saying about how, with you here, we could do amazing things together. We have the best biological, mechanical, and medical facilities here. Facilities that co-“  
“Did you say medical?”

_And then, suddenly there was Robert James MacCready. His face in the morning when the light paints slats through the window, his self-deprecating laughter, his sweet tooth, his steadfast support, his stupid hat, his secret love of poetry, the way he hadn’t blamed her once for what happened to his hand. His hand…_

She knew what she had to do.

“Shaun?”  
“Yes?”  
“I will help you, but I am going to need your help with something.”

-

The zap from Yoshimi returning to the platform woke everyone up. Everyone save for MacCready, who had been awake, waiting for her, just as he had promised.

She had been gone for fifteen hours and it was early morning. His stomach was rumbling, his stump _itched like hell_ , and his eyes burned from a lack of sleep, but the second he saw her all his wordily discomforts edged into the background.

When she came back, she was completely alone, and the look on her face was one he had never seen before. It was strange, distant, angry, sorrowful, and so much more. _It wasn’t good._

Immediately, she stalked off the platform and started walking for Sanctuary without a word to any of them. MacCready gave a quick shout to the others to tell them to head back to Railroad HQ, and then he followed her. He ran in long, leaping strides until they were in step. Silently, he took her hand in his, and they walked.

He pretended he didn’t notice when the tears started pouring down her face. She appreciated the gesture.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hated Father when I played the game. I honestly thought Bethesda didn't give me a lot of motivation to care for him at all, even if he was my son, so I'm kind of going down that route - the disconnect, especially considering everything with Yoshimi, didn't seem to be that far off base.
> 
> Also he's a huge dick, so wutevs.


	20. revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter set inside their cabin before some more fightin' and rootin' and tootin'.

The settlers in Sanctuary were used to Yoshimi coming and going wordlessly, but this time everyone felt the tension of her presence as she strode through the front gates. Everyone knew she was making the trip to the Institute, and everyone knew that Yoshimi never cried, so when she strolled down the main road with a wet, red face and her mouth set in a thin line, they stayed back.

In the back of her mind, behind all the noise, she made a note to thank them for their kindness after everything was over and done with. _Even Marcy._

Yoshimi broke away from MacCready, letting go of his hand for the last few steps to and through the door to their cabin. When the door shut behind them, she took two more silent steps before crumpling into a heap on the floor. After months and months of keeping herself in check, compartmentalizing her feelings and forcing herself to keep hopeful that things would turn out, she just… had no energy left. She could taste salt in her mouth, snot running down her throat, and through it all, she could feel MacCready. His arms, warm and steady, wrapped around her shoulders as she shook, as she coughed, as she raged.

He didn’t know what had happened, but it was obvious that she hadn’t found what she was hoping to.

His heart broke, for her, for all the nights he could feel her stir in bed beside him, plagued by her guilt, her nightmares, her repressed hopes.

When she pounded her fist against the wooden slats of the floor until her knuckles started to bleed, he buried his face into the hair on the back of her neck. When she screamed her throat raw he pressed his fingertips gently into her forearms as he encircled her from behind, gently rubbing the thumb of his good hand along the tiny bone on her wrist. When she fell asleep, still in a heap, her face ruddy and her hands shaking, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her to bed.

And then, when she was safe and undressed and covered in a blanket, he let out a beleaguered sigh and gave himself the opportunity to cry, silently, staring down into his lap – because, though he’d never tell her so, his heart also broke for the son, her son, that he'd never get a chance to meet.

-

She didn’t sleep long. When she woke the sun was high in the sky outside the window next to their bed and she watched the light make circular patterns through the tattered drapes onto MacCready’s torso as he snored quietly beside her. She sat up in bed, gently prodding at the swollen skin on her cheeks and lips, still too emotionally worn to let any thoughts that weren’t monosyllabic enter her head.

_Bathroom. Food. Clothes._

She gingerly lifted herself from the bed, up and over her companion, onto the floor. She was naked and could feel the cool breeze of not-quite-spring through the cracks in the cabin’s siding, so she remedied her discomfort by taking his discarded button down and pulling it on, padding barefoot down the stairs to rummage for something to eat.

There wasn’t much. _I really need to remember to start storing food here if we’re going to be spending more time in Sanctuary._ A can of pork ‘n beans and two bent metal sporks was all she could muster. She carried the can, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a hair brush, the utensils, and a room temperature bottle of Nuka Cola Cherry upstairs, all nestled in her arms. When she reached the top of the stairs, MacCready was sitting up in bed cross-legged, grimacing and rubbing at the pink fold of skin at the end of his stump.

She frowned, “Still itching a lot?”  
“Yeah, but it’s alright. Modern medicine can make me a healed amputee in a few weeks, but it can’t take away the itch. Figures.” His voice carried a certain nonchalance and she could tell he wanted to ask what happened just by the way his eyes met hers. They were bluer than usual, clear, bright, _questioning_. She strode forward, dumping her small pile of provisions onto the edge of the bed before crawling over them to get back into the nest of covers and pillows, sitting next to MacCready, their knees touching. He stayed quiet, making a point to let her steer the conversation, _she’s like a radstag in a trap, just let her breathe,_ opening the pack of cigarettes and pulling two out, tucking one into the corner of his mouth and lighting it before presenting the other one to Yoshimi.

She took it and scissored it loosely between two fingers, closing her eyes and breathing deep, “Shaun… he wasn’t a kid. Apparently sixty years had passed when I thought it had only been ten. He was… an old man. A cruel, foolish old man. He… he…” A deep throaty laugh tumbled out, unnatural and out of place, “he runs the fuckin’ Institute! Him! My son! He’s… he’s the boss. He’s the one scaring the commonwealth into war, into _death_ , he’s the one… he’s…” She could feel the tears welling up again and shook her head, resolutely blinking hard to keep them at bay.

The cigarette fell out of MacCready’s mouth onto the comforter and he had to scramble to put it out before it caught fire. He didn’t know what to say. _Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What do I… what do you… what…_ “Sh-shoot,” he mumbled clumsily. “I… _shit_ , Yosh, I don’t know… I’m not sure what to say.” _Smooth._

Yoshimi couldn’t help but smile, just a small one. “ _Yeah._ ”

-

They fell into a strange comfortable silence. Yoshimi opened the can with one of her knives and set it down on the bed so they could share, taking spoonfuls, chewing, swallowing, lost in their own thoughts despite their close proximity. She could feel him working out what to say to her, what comfort to offer, what advice to share. She could sense his struggle, his belief that anything he said wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to tell him otherwise, to offer some comfort, but the hollow in her chest was too big. No beans or soft words were going to fill it, and she had none to give. So she chewed, swallowed, and kept to herself.

_What do you say to the woman you love when her world is crashing down around her?_

“Hey, Yosh?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Knock knock.”  
“…Who’s there?”  
“Aldo.”  
“Aldo who?”  
“Aldo anything for you.”

Yoshimi laughed despite herself. MacCready grinned. They opened the Nuka Cola and passed it back and forth until it was gone.

-

“Are you… I don’t know… angry with me?”  
“N-no? Why would I be?”  
“Somehow, all this turmoil comes down to me. All this pain. You… your hand, the fear in the Commonwealth, all of it.”  
“Yosh, you’ll never survive if you blame yourself for everything that happens.”  
“I know, I… ugh. There’s more, you know…”  
“Huh?”  
“I agreed… to… to help them. The Institute. I just want some time to figure things out, decide what to do. Everyone keeps pulling me in all of these different directions and none of them feels quite right and I just… need… time. I mean, he’s my son, even if he’s… even if everything he stands for is wrong, I have to at least try to see if there’s anything salvageable there, right? Shouldn’t I?”  
“It’s not about should or shouldn’t. You’re going to do it because you’re you, and that’s okay. I’m going to be there every step of the way, with you, for you, you know.”  
“What did I ever do to deserve you?”  
“You paid 200 caps, that’s what you did.”  
“They said… I asked… they can make you a new hand, if you wanted. I have to ‘prove my loyalty’ before they’ll let me bring you in, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t want to bring you there if you don’t want to, though. I just thought, that, if I’m going to be involved there for the time being, I could at least get something good out of it.”  
“There you go again, always thinking of everybody else first. Thank you, Yoshimi. For being you. Now, in the spirit of thinking of others, what can I do to make you feel better right this moment?”  
“Hm… an orgasm would be nice.”  
“You’re an angel. I swear to god, you’re perfect.”

-

MacCready angled his body so he could cup Yoshimi’s face with his good hand, pressing his lips against hers with a soft ferocity saved only for those who are _really fuckin’ in love_. She let herself exist in the moment, completely, without thought or tension or doubt, and when he felt her submit to him his whole body shivered with a strange unrepentant electricity. He kissed her, every part of her, reached in and through and around, tasted every angle, every corner, every sweet curve and crevice. They weren’t fucking, they weren’t having sex, they weren’t even making love, they were _transcending_ – to another plane of trust, of promise, of sweetness, of pleasure, of love. 

The first time she came, it was with his head nestled between her thighs, her fingers tangled in the hair at the base of his neck.

The second time she came, it was with him inside of her, bent over her, their bodies slick with sweat and their breath hanging in the air, heavy, like foggy condensation on a spring window. He was close, his body tensed with the _everything-ness_ of her, and when she crossed her ankles behind his back and begged him to come inside of her, to _please just stay inside of her, to never leave,_ he was gone. _There was no turning back. Not now, not ever._ He collapsed on top of her, shivering, his face against her neck as she held him so tightly he could feel it burn where their bones rubbed together. He didn’t care. Neither did she.

When his come dribbled slowly down her thigh as they reclined, tangled, in the mess of sheets, Yoshimi found herself no longer worried about how anything would turn out as long as he was with her. When he rolled off onto his back and she, still sitting, angled her body so she was looking down, softly, at his face, she found herself suddenly compelled to ask, “Do… do people get married anymore? Like, where they sign papers and… you know?”

A surprised laugh tumbled from his mouth. He reached up with his good hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, “No, not really. Who would be there to keep track of the papers anyways? You just sort of decide one day and that’s that.”

“Hm…”

“What is it?”

“I…”

“Yosh, I’ve been married to you since I saw you kick the head off a super mutant in Boston Public. If you’d do me the kindness of returning the favor, I’d give both hands to be given the honor to call you my wife.”

“You don’t have both hands to give! You only have one left!”

“Shut up and marry me.”

“Okay. Done. That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Tomorrow I have to go back to the Institute to report in and get my first assignment.”

“Then I guess we better make the most of today, Mrs. MacCready.”

"That sounds weird. Don't call me that."

"Married five seconds and you're already nagging? Really?"

"Shush. I love you. So fuckin' much."

"I love you too, _Mrs. MacCready_."

-

Robert James MacCready was a lot of things. A lush, a mercenary, an unabashed lover of comic books and a former mayor of a child city. One thing he wasn’t was an idiot, and when he watched Yoshimi sleep quietly that night, curling like a _fucking present_ against his side, willing to push boundaries to get him a new hand, willing to give chances where they weren't deserved, willing to do _anything_ just to make the world a kinder place (even if it killed her) he knew that any single thing she needed from him would be worth being able to spend the rest of his life with her by his side. He was smart enough to know that.

“ _I’ll burn down the whole damn Commonwealth for her if she asks it of me. Wherever she goes, I go._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm struggling a little bit with inspiration (and depression but whatever) right now, so apologies in advance if chapters start coming every couple days instead of every day (and sorry if this one sucked).


	21. hand it along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kickin' Brotherhood butt, and also magical future science magic. Next two chapters will have some adventurin' fluff.

The first anniversary of Yoshimi leaving the vault for the unforgiving landscape of post-apocalyptic Massachusetts passed with barely more than a whisper. Three months had gone by since she agreed to help the Institute, help Shaun, all in the hopes of helping the man she loved and finding some perspective amidst the chaos.

She could feel an end coming, or a beginning, characterized by a strange tension set in at the top of her spine, right between her shoulders. She could feel it in the way each breath she pulled in between her teeth rattled in her throat. She could feel it in the way she started to pull away from everyone – the scientists at the Institute, Shaun, the friends she had barely seen in months back in Sanctuary, the Minutemen, the Railroad, all of them – everyone, except _him_.

_Except MacCready. Robert. Husband. Confidant. Faithful, fearless friend._

Even if he didn't know it, his constant presence was the only thing keeping her from strapping herself to a Mini Nuke and blowing herself into the bay.

-

The conference room was clean, _too clean_ , as she sat at the head of the table next to her son, listening to him announce her as his successor. Yoshimi found herself wondering how often they had someone come through to wipe the table down because it was shining clearly enough to be a mirror – she could see a skewed version of her own face in it’s surface – pointed chin, cheekbones, blurry purple circles around lucky penny irises. _How come so many people think this is the face of a leader?_ She stuck her tongue out at her own blurry reflection in an act of momentary stress relief.

She was barely listening as the various members of the Directorate protested, asked questions, whined, and whispered. She almost didn’t register the sound as Shaun quietly stood up, placed one palm on the table top and sighed, “Enough. She has proven over the last few months that she has a vision for the Institute that will elevate us into the new age. As is written in our organization’s constitution, I am able to choose who succeeds me and I choose her. You can protest all you like, but it's final.” His brow furrowed, and he did his best to hide a soft shudder, an involuntary clenching of his jaw muscle. _He’s in pain. It’s getting worse. All the best minds in the world and they still haven’t figured out fuckin’ cancer – and yet they still think they’re the smartest ones in the world. Figures._

“Additionally, tomorrow she will be bringing someone in from the Commonwealth that she considers a close friend and ally. He will be here briefly to receive a promised medical procedure. If you have any questions, please defer them to Dr. Volkert or Dr. Holdren.”

_He needs his medicine. He has to know we can see how bad it’s gotten. Time to wrap this up._

Yoshimi reached out and made a deliberate smudge with her fingertip on the pristine tabletop. “That’s all for now,” her voice was low, trying on an authoritative tone as if it was a rented uniform, “Meeting adjourned.”

She sat in the room long after everyone had left, quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She thought about everything she had learned, all the people she had met, and the decision she ultimately had to make, _soon_. 

Mainly, though, she thought about how it had been almost three weeks since she last saw MacCready due to the impossible schedule she kept within the Institute and whether or not he was nervous about the hand surgery, whether or not he had been missing her as much as she had been missing him.

-

MacCready missed Yoshimi so much he was ready to start digging down to the Institute with his one good hand and the endless determination of a man who was _really fuckin’ bored, really fuckin’ lonely, and really fuckin’ tired of having to tell Preston that he couldn’t give him any more information about what Yoshimi was up to._

Not that he knew. Not really. He knew she had been keeping him in the dark for his own safety, or at least for what she thought was his own safety, but that was all about to change.

“What do I even wear on a trip to a secret underground hive of hermits and self-serving scientists? What do I say to the adult son of my time-traveling wife that just happens to be three times my age and also king of the self-serving scientist hermits?” He spoke to no one in particular, sitting on the faded couch in the cabin’s front room, rubbing his stump against his thigh out of habit. Dogmeat, lounging in the corner, heard him and lifted his head to tilt it to one side before letting out a low whine, as if he was saying “I don’t fuckin’ know, man.”

-

 

“Are you ready? Being teleported for the first time feels pretty weird, so just put your arms around my waist and close your eyes.”  
“Kiss for good luck?”  
“You don’t need any luck, but… alright, okay, _fine_.”

-

MacCready had never seen a place so clean in his entire life. Much like Yoshimi when she first arrived, he found himself incredibly uncomfortable with the disparity between him and his surroundings. When they stumbled out of the teleporter into the receiving room, he couldn’t help but feel dirty and out of place. When he glanced over to Yoshimi at his side, standing up straight, wearing a pristine white lab coat over the top of her vault suit, he couldn’t help but feel like they were on two different planets, in two different worlds.

_I wish she’d come home._

They were greeted by two men: a thin lipped, tired looking older man in a white lab coat with bright green sleeves pushed up to his elbows and a dark-skinned mustachioed man with a much more jovial disposition. The first one stood with his arms crossed while the second one offered a handshake to MacCready, introducing himself gently, “Dr. Oberly, from Bioscience. Next to me is Dr. Volkert. I helped build your new hand, he’s gonna be the one attaching it.”

_Isn’t everyone at the Institute supposed to be mean and stuffy? This guy seems pretty nice…_

“U-uh, thanks?” MacCready stammered, unable to shake his innate awkwardness in the unfamiliar surroundings. “I…” He started to speak again, unsure what the hell he was even trying to say when he felt Yoshimi press a steady palm against his lower back. He exhaled instinctively as his body relaxed and then he sighed, giving a gentle shrug, “Sorry, I’m just a little off-kilter from everything going on.”

Oberly chuckled, low and throaty, before slapping MacCready on the back, “Well, sounds like a perfect time for major surgery, then!”

-

The surgical suite was a fairly small rectangular room with harsh overhead lighting. MacCready reclined in a padded chair in the center, bathed and changed into simple ash grey scrubs. His wounded arm, _I wonder if it’ll still itch as much with the new hand_ , was stretched out and strapped to a clean acrylic table along his side. 

_Jesus, I’m going to die. They’re going to kill me, they’re going to probe me, they’re going to turn me into a synth, this isn’t going well, why did I agree to this, this is stupid oh god where are they why am I here alone what if the Institute is actually run by aliens and they’ve actually killed and replaced Yoshimi and are coming for me now and and and…_

“Babe, you need to relax.”

Yoshimi. Her voice was like a salve on his panicked mind and as she came into view, wearing plastic gloves, a shower cap, and a white respirator, he was suddenly hit by the seriousness of what was going to happen to him. He was getting a new hand. A robotic hand. What would it look like? How would it feel? Would it really be his? What if they did something to it?

She reached for his hand and he accepted her touch readily, letting out a beleaguered groan as she ran a thumb across the back of his hand. “Oberly and Volkert will be here soon. They say the procedure can take up to twelve hours with another forty-eight hours afterward for calibrations and tinting – you know, making the hand match your skin tone. They’re sending me out on a mission to some place called Mass Fusion while you’re under. I protested, but they said that the Brotherhood is there now and they need me to go and…” She trailed off, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose, her mouth taking on a soft downward curve.

MacCready squeezed her hand once, gently, looking at her intently, his eyes wandering over her face. The purple rings around her eyes looked darker – bruised, almost – and small lines were forming around the corners of her eyes and mouth. The last three months had weighed on her, and he could see it. She still smiled for him, but they felt forced – not lacking genuine feeling, just overshadowed by responsibility and regret. He wanted to take the time to sit and talk with her about the things going through her mind, show his support, show that he noticed her and the things plaguing her. Show her how much he _fuckin' loved and appreciated her._

_Three months of calling her wife and she still struggles to let me in. I’d start getting resentful if I wasn’t such a nice guy who is also busy worrying about getting a synthetic hand attached to his stumpy arm. Stumpy. Stum-pee. Shit, I have to pee. Too late now._

He pulled his hand away from hers and reached up to cup her chin, pulling her forward until she bent into him for a breathy kiss – lips against the plastic mouth guard of the respirator. She laughed, a short burst of air through her nose, before pulling away, her eyes growing suddenly distant. “When I’m back and you’re out of surgery, I’m going to take some time off. We’ll go out on the road like when we first met. I need some perspective. Everything here is starting to overwhelm me. I…” _Oh my god she’s so cute when she blushes like that._ “I miss you. You’re the only one I’ve got who’ll give it to me straight and help me figure out what to do here. So, yeah, we’ll go on a little adventure if you're up to it, okay?”

“Okay, angel. That sounds great. Stop worrying so much. Everything’s going to be okay. I’d ask you to kiss my stump for good luck, but that would probably go against their clean room protocols.”

Yoshimi did her best impression of a wife annoyed with her husbands endless joking despite the relief she felt at his response.

“I love you.”  
“I love you more.”  
“Doubt it, but it looks like your doctors are here so we won’t have the chance to fight over it. These two, they’re some of the good ones here, so relax. They won’t probe you or steal your kidneys or anything.”

_Gotta give her credit for knowing the sort of things I’d be worrying about._

-

“Woah – it’s blue!”  
“Yes, Mr. MacCready, the synthetic material is a metallic blue until we do the tint-matching with your skin.”  
“Do you… uh… do you have to do that? The tint thing?”  
“You want a blue hand?”  
“It looks cool! Like a superhero hand!”  
“I… ah… well, I… are you sure?”  
“He-heck yeah.”  
“A…alright, sure, we can skip the tinting.” _Loud sigh._ “We’re attaching the IV now. You’ll be going under soon. When you wake up, if everything goes well, you will have full working use of your new hand.”  
“If… everything go… we…?” _Snore._

-

“It feels like having your stomach pulled through your throat and then thrown off a building before bungeeing back into your torso.” Yoshimi groaned to no one in particular as the flash of the teleporter landed them in the middle of the empty executive suite at Mass Fusion. The building shook with explosions below, and all she wanted was to get the job done as quickly as possible so she could get back to MacCready.

“Allie, you get what you need and I’ll keep you safe.” Yoshimi’s companion, a short woman with straw colored hair and a face that always looked disapproving, nodded once and gave a quick affirmation before rummaging through the room for a keycard to the lower levels. A few gen-1s milled about in case anyone from the Brotherhood had the wherewithal to come upstairs, and, in preparation for the fight ahead of them, Yoshimi stretched.

 _It’s going to be too late to let the Railroad in on what’s happening if I don’t decide on a course of action soon._ She bent low at the waist, touching her palms to the floor. _The Minutemen don’t have a hand in this fight but they’d defend my choices if it came down to it._ She reached her arms up above her head, arching her whole body to the left and then the right. _The Brotherhood is nothing but a group of self-serving imbeciles on a power trip, but I’d rather not be the one to take them down personally._ She swiftly began running through her tai chi chu’an as Allie climbed up stairs to a balcony above, grumbling about the mess.

_I have to stop believing there’s a way to get out of this without getting a whole hell of a lot of blood on my hands._

“Found it!” The doctor was leaning over the banister of the upper balcony, waving an innocuous grey keycard around. “Let’s get this done with. The air up here smells foul.”

-

“Oh my god. Oh my god. _Oh my god!_ ”  
“I told you it might not be a good idea to choose to skip the tinting, Mr. MacCready. I know I’d be startled if I woke up with a shimmery cobalt appendage.”  
“ _It looks so fu-freaking cool!_ ”  
“I… ah… yes, well then.”

-

Yoshimi’s body was a finely tuned machine. When she was truly focused, completely in the zone, it could move without her thinking, without her guiding it. The waves of Brotherhood soldiers they met in the office building’s large atrium were nothing but background noise to the smooth motion of her body through the air, her blades through flesh. She arced, danced, weaved, pounded through them as if they were nothing. She could feel her fists get hot from all the spilled blood drying stickily between her fingers, under her nails, but she just kept moving until she was the only one left able to move.

Later she’d think of all the lives she cut, quite literally, short – bile would rise in her throat, guilt would roil in her stomach – but at that moment, amidst the adrenaline, the smoke, the soft pitter-patter of rubble falling from walls – she felt undoubtedly alive.

“Well, fuck me, I’ll never get you angry.” Dr. Filmore came out from behind the pillar she was hiding behind in the atrium, keycard clutched in a white-knuckled fist. “Come on, let’s get downstairs to the reactor before the next wave blasts in.”

Breaths were heaving in Yoshimi’s chest, leaving words caught somewhere between her mind and her stomach, so instead of saying anything she just nodded and stepped lightly to the next elevator.

-

MacCready raised his arm straight out in front of him and spread the fingers of his new hand, marveling at the way the color seemed to shift – _like when sunlight catches in a puddle of old gasoline_ – as light hit the chromatic blue of the flesh. _Flesh._ It felt like skin, despite the color, it felt real, natural, as if he hadn’t lost his entire hand to a grenade blast three months prior.

They fastened a thin, black watch-like band around his wrist where his new hand met his old skin. Oberly was excited to tell him that the device had been created as a side-project by Madison Li herself and that apparently the director decided to test it out on him since they didn’t have many people around who were out and about in the Commonwealth who could test it “in the field.”

It was a lot like Yoshimi’s pip-boy, they told him, except it was smaller, better, _faster_. It could show him his heart beat, the status of his radiation, his current blood sugar, as well as a myriad of other things.

MacCready lowered his eyes, bringing his hand down into his lap, flexing his fingers over and over to get a feel for the newness of the whole thing. “There has to be a catch. Why are you doing this?”

Oberly lowered his voice conspiratorially as Volkert stood near the far wall, writing something down on a chart, “Honestly, since Yoshimi has been around, the director has been acting strange. I don’t know if it’s her or his illness, but he’s kind of… well, he’s gotten softer. I don’t know what she plans on doing once he passes, but I think, whatever it is, it’s going to steer us in a much better direction.”

_No wonder she looks so tired. Everyone around her is telling her she has to kill these people, and for the most part, most of them aren’t that bad._

MacCready sighed, glaringly aware of how tired he was, his voice gravelly as he replied, “She’s like that. So what’s next? Time for a potty break?”

“Time for calibration! We’ll have you run through a series of increasingly complicated tasks to make sure that the connection between your brain and the hand is healthy, and, if any problems arise, we’ll take care of them in real time using Volkert’s deft handiwork and my interfacing device. Cool, huh?”

“Whatever you say, doc. I was serious about the potty break, though.”

-

Yoshimi clutched at a large gash on her side as blood pooled out and around her fingertips. The lower right side of her face, jaw, and neck were red and raw from a laser burn. Her ribs felt tender – a few broken, maybe – and her ankle throbbed with each step. “Dr. Filmore, the next time you send me into a chamber to get terribly irradiated, please kill all the assaultrons in the vicinity before I’m back.”

The good doctor had enough humility to at least pretend she was sorry as she continued to pack the beryllium agitator ( _Whatever the fuck that is, some magic power source, I don’t even care._ ) into the special carrying case she had brought along.

Yoshimi’s hair was slick with sweat and clinging to the back of her neck, her face, every piece of bare skin it could fine ( _I should have put it in a braid._ ). She had stimpaked the worst of her injuries but she was still going to need some assistance from the doctors – stitches, some poultice for the bruises burgeoning like flowers of death all over her body. She didn’t mind, though, the medical bay was exactly where she wanted to be at that moment either way.

Allie Filmore tutted impatiently at Yoshimi as she administered another stimpak, never the type of woman to give leeway for anyone. “Ms. Yoshimi, it’d be nice to get moving.”

“Hey, Dr. Filmore?”  
“Yes?”  
“Can you remind me to fire you once I take over as Director?”  
“I’ll add it to your calendar. Now, come on, let’s go.”

-

At the same time Yoshimi was tending to her wounds, MacCready was sitting in a recovery room adjacent to the medical bay, thumbing through a comic book with his new hand, marveling at every sensation. _It’s an actual copy of Demon Slaves, Demon Sands and I can feel it and my hand feels real and it’s mine and this is so cool how did they even do this stuff like this could help so many people dude wow holy shit._ He pressed his palm flat against the glossy paper, giggling self-indulgently as his “skin” stuck to the surface as he lifted it from the page.

“What’s so funny, Mr. MacCready?”

He wheeled in his chair and found himself struck with a feeling he had never had so frequently before meeting Yoshimi: awe. She leaned against the doorway, covered in grime, dust, dried blood, and gunpowder – and she looked _phenomenal_. He stood up, stumbling slightly from the head rush ( _And all the Med-X, woosh_ ), taking two long strides over to her, running his new hand up her neck to cup her face before pulling her into a kiss that was entirely too inappropriate for the open medical bay.

A few scientists had no qualms gaping open mouthed at the couple. Yoshimi made a mental note to give them shit for it later.

“Your hand… it’s… it’s blue.”  
“I know! Isn’t it cool?”

Yoshimi paused, closed her eyes, and blew an over-dramatic sigh from her mouth. A small smile played at the corner of her lips for a moment, growing, steadily, into a wide toothy grin as she pulled him in for another kiss, and another, and another, before breaking away to turn her head and authoritatively grumble, “back to work!” to all of the onlookers.

-

“Oberly said you’re okay already? And you haven’t had any problems using it?”  
“He said there might be a few hiccups in the first few days as my brain adjusts to the… the… whatchamacallits, but he said it won’t feel like anything other than a momentary muscle cramp and to just relax and let it pass. The technology here is pretty amazing, Yosh. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.”  
“I know, they’ve accomplished a lot. I noticed they gave you Dr. Li’s prototype neo-pip-boy. No one told me that was going to happen.”  
“Oberly said Shaun requested it, for field testing, I guess.”  
“Yeah, I guess…”  
“So what was that you said about getting away for a little bit?”  
“Well, Robert, have you ever heard of _The Treasure of Jamaica Plain?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will trade dirty stories for fanart 
> 
> -
> 
> speaking of fanart, check out the yoshimi tag on my tumblr blog for some of the super cool stuff I've collected of these babies so far: http://roboille.tumblr.com/tagged/yoshimi


	22. conversations on the road, vol. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another one of these lil' chapters for your reading pleasure. Angst will be back soon enough. Smut will be too.

“So, what’d you say to get out of your Institute duties for the next couple weeks?”  
“I just told Shaun to tell everyone that I wasn’t available and that I needed to get out to figure some things out.”  
“And he just… let you?”  
“I’m his mother, he’s not mine.”  
“Still…”  
“I also may have made some choice threats to the livelihood of any and all members of the SRB they have on staff if he dared send any coursers after me.”  
“Now that’s the Yoshimi I know and love.”

-

“So, what is the treasure of Jamaica Plain?”  
“No one knows! It could be anything. I found an old flyer and it was pretty non-descript, but it called the treasure one-of-a-kind.”  
“I’m willing to bet twenty caps, right now, that it’s just a vault filled with toy spaceships.”  
“Party pooper.”  
“Fine, twenty-eight caps.”

-

“Does it feel weird?”  
“Does what feel weird?”  
“You know – the hand – does it feel, I don’t know, unnatural?”  
“No, it feels great. It actually feels better than my old hand, and the best part is whatever material they used doesn’t get dirty. It’s always going to be shiny and blue like I’m some sort of futuristic magician.”  
“You’re really into that color, huh?”  
“I should have asked Oberly to build a lighter into my pointer finger.”  
“Honestly, he probably would have.”

-

“Hey, Robert…”  
“Yeah, babe?”  
“Is there… is there anything you’d like to do? After this is all settled? I sometimes worry that all I do is drag you along for all these ridiculous tasks and jobs and never stop to ask how you feel about it all.”  
“Ha, you really need to stop worrying so much.”  
“Come on, I’m being serious.”  
“I know, I know. Sorry. Hmm… well, I’d like to go get Duncan and bring him back to Sanctuary, I think. I don’t know how you feel about staying there, but it’s a really nice place and if we kept at it, it could become a great refuge for people. For a long time I thought Duncan would be best off if I left him in Rivet City with CC and Butch, but… I’m not sure anymore, and I think the only way I’d be able to figure it out is to go back.”  
“That’d be a long journey.”  
“Yeah, it would be…”  
“Let’s do it. You, me, Dogmeat, traveling down the coast. It’ll be something to look forward to.”

-

“YOU DID IT AGAIN!”  
“W-what?”  
“DON’T TELL ME YOU HAPPENED TO NOT NOTICE THAT YOU PUNCHED THAT FERAL DOGS HEAD OFF.”  
“That was my knife, not my fist, you idiot!”  
“WHATEVER, YOSHIMI.”

-

“You’ve been looking really tired lately.”  
“Gee, thanks.”  
“Shut up, you know what I mean. You’ve got a lot weighing on you. I… uh… I wish you’d share more with me.”  
“I’m not good at that, letting people in. Y-… you’re my best friend, and my life partner, and, like, I know I should be telling you everything, but it’s really hard for me, especially right now. Just… let me work up to it, okay? We’ll have to talk before we go back. One of the big ones. I know I need to get everything out so it’s not bumping around in my head, but, honestly, I’ll probably need some wine before I’m ready to share. It’s just a lot of pressure from all sides and while I know I'm not managing it as well as I should, I'm doing the best I can.”  
“I know, I understand. It’s okay, and… I figured as much with the wine thing. Brought four bottles in my pack.”  
“Have I told you lately that I love you?”  
“Yeah, but you can say it again if you want.”

-

“You didn’t tell me that you asked Oberly and Volkert to fix your teeth while you were under.”  
“Actually, I didn’t ask them to. I was kind of irritated when I woke up. My mouth felt weird, wrong. I told Oberly I’d fill _his_ mouth with lead the next time he did anything like that against my wishes and he just laughed and told me he’d cross the probe off the list. I guess they just thought they were doing me a favor and did the reconstruction on a whim – for _procedural curiosity_ , Volkert said. Honestly, though… they always bothered me, my teeth, and they always hurt. I never took care of them when I was a kid, because, well, I was a kid – I didn’t know better. You try living off a diet of cave fungus and candy and come out of it with pearly whites. Now, though, after getting used to it, it’s probably a good thing, I think? Now I can tell Duncan to brush his teeth in the future and he won’t be able to push back about it. I still can’t stop running my tongue over them, though.”  
“Maybe we should take it in shifts. I can run my tongue over them next.”  
“Since you’re the most gorgeous woman alive, that was kind of hot, but next time you’re really going to have to step up your sex talk game. That was pretty weak.”  
“This coming from the guy who asked if he could _butter my biscuits_ last night?”  
“Hey! It worked, didn’t it?”

-

“I miss Dogmeat.”  
“He misses you too. When you were away at the Institute, he’d never lay in the bed with me, always next to it.”  
“I guess I’m a better snuggler than you.”  
“I guess so. We should bring him a nice, juicy Deathclaw steak back from this trip.”  
“I knew spending the extra time sharpening my blades before we left was a good idea.”

-

“Hey, Yosh?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Ah, nothin’.”  
“Come on, what is it?”  
“Y-you… you look beautiful right now.”  
“What? I’m not doing anything. We’re just walking.”  
“Just take the da-darn compliment, you nincompoop.”

-

“I wish I could have introduced you to my father. He would have liked you. He would have said ‘Ah, Yoshimi, this one has spirit, he will balance you out.’”  
“And that would be the perfect chance for me to lift you up and balance you on my shoulders!”  
“On second thought, maybe it’s good you’ll never get a chance to meet.”  
“Come here, let’s practice!”  
“No!”  
“Stop running away! Let me balance youuuuuu!”

-

“Mm, you smell nice.”  
“We haven’t bathed in four days.”  
“Doesn’t matter. You smell like you. C’mere.”  
“I… ah… okay, fine, scooch over.”

-

“Christmas is coming up. I totally forgot last year because I had only been out of the vault for a couple months.”  
“Most people don’t really get the opportunity to celebrate. They put trees and lights up in Diamond City, but no one really knows any traditions except that people used to give each other presents, and that there was that one guy… Santa Claus? Was he a real guy, or…?”  
“Ha, no, he’s just a fairytale character that parents would tell their children about. He had a big white beard and wore a red suit. Kids would write him letters asking for things for Christmas and he was said to fly around the world in a magical sleigh pulled by reindeer.”  
“Sounds pretty impossible. What are reindeer?”  
“They were kind of like radstag, but… different. They were fluffier, and bigger.”  
“Huh. Did you like Christmas? Before the war?”  
“When I was a child, it was just my father and I. He always had an open door policy because we were one of the better off families in the neighborhood, so each year on Christmas day there would be a small group of people from nearby, the ones who had nowhere else to go, that would come by and we’d roast a duck and eat chocolate oranges and exchange small gifts like firecrackers and notes and string bracelets. The older people would get a little drunk off of wine and sing songs. I always fell asleep in front of the fireplace with our cat, Ginger. Wow, you know… I totally forgot about her until now…”  
“I don’t know what half of those things are, but I wish I could have. It sounds… nice, being able to have moments like that.”  
“The biggest thing we lost when the bombs fell was the ability to take a moment to truly appreciate one another, to truly connect. Most people are too busy fearing for their lives to give it any consideration – and I don’t blame them, considering.”  
“Let’s do Christmas in Sanctuary. You can teach us the old songs and we can all attempt to cook something that isn’t awful. The greenhouse that Sturges and Codsworth built has been working pretty well. Curie has started cooking, too. She calls it 'the science of tasting.' We could try and get some of that back, Yosh. That feeling you're talking about.”  
“Mm… yeah, yeah, that’d be really nice.”

-

“Hey Yoshimi, are you sure you’re not an alien?”  
“Huh, what?”  
“Because your ass looks _out of this world_ in that vault suit.”

-

“Hey Yoshimi…”  
“Yeah?”  
“Do you have radiation poisoning? Because you are absolutely _glowing_.”

-

“Hey, Yo-“  
“Nope. Nope. _Nope._ ”  
“No, I actually have a serious question this time.”  
 _Sigh._ “Okay, what is it?”  
“Do you have a laser pistol in your pocket?”  
“ _Mac._ ”  
“Because I am feelin’ some serious energy between us.”

-

“Hey-“  
 _Yoshimi refuses to answer._

-

“Hey MacCready?”  
“What’s up, Yo?”  
“Are you a tunnel snake? Because you _rule._ ”  
 _Groan._

-

“Do you think Duncan will like me? I mean… I’m not a particularly likable person.”  
“Honestly, I’m more concerned with whether or not he’ll like me. You? He’ll love you immediately. You’re strong, cool, badass, and you have a ton of amazing stories to tell. Plus, you’re super pretty, and… what? Why are you looking at me like that? Am I about to step on a mine or something?”  
“It’s just hard to accept that anyone could see me the way you do. It’s… it’s just, it’s… it’s nice.”  
“Well, you’re my wife. I could do without all the time you spend farting in your sleep, but we all have sacrifices we’ve got to make.”

-

“Look alive. Raiders up ahead. A lot of ‘em. Your hand doing okay with the rifle?”  
“Yeah, I’m feeling great. Let’s make a bet.”  
“Okay, what are you thinking?”  
“Whoever takes out fewer raiders has to do a sexy striptease for the other.”  
“I honestly feel like I lose that one either way.”  
“Too late now, they’re coming!”  
 _Sigh._

-

“Hey, come here.”  
“Oh my god that feels so good.”  
“Your hair turns into a weird rat’s nest on top of your head if you don’t brush it, and you, you don’t brush it.”  
“I only don’t brush it so you get frustrated with how bad it looks and brush it for me. _Oh my god_ , it’s almost better than sex.”  
“That good?”  
 _MacCready groans unintelligibly._

-

“Do you even know how to butcher a Deathclaw?”  
“No! I thought you did!”  
“The last time I killed one, Strong took care of breaking it down all while whistling a jaunty tune.”  
“Well, we can’t just leave it. It took almost two hours to kill the damn thing. My wrists hurt, and it got my hip pretty good.”  
“You’re whining when all you had to do was shoot at it from cover while I was fist fighting the damn thing.”  
“And I am truly in awe of your physical prowess, but that doesn’t help us cut it up for eating, and my tummy is grumbly.”  
“I somehow managed to marry the only grown man in the Commonwealth that seriously uses the word tummy.”

-

“Robert, hold up.”  
“What's goin' on?”  
“I just wanted to make sure you know how much I appreciate you and everything you do. I know I’m kind of irritable and stuff, but… you’re so incredibly important to me. I sometimes don’t even know how to articulate it.”  
“ _Gum drops._ ”  
“Huh?”  
“If you’re having trouble saying how you feel, just give me some gum drops and I’ll understand, like when we first met.”  
“I was just being nice back then! I wasn’t madly in love with you after twelve hours.”  
“ _Sure you weren’t._ ”  
 _Yoshimi throws a package of Gum Drops at MacCready’s head before stomping off._

-

“Here we are. Jamaica Plain. Keep your eyes open. We’ve got to find the Town Hall. There’ll probably be raiders or ghouls about. Maybe both.”  
“You know, it’d be cool if there was some old world jewelry in this treasure, like stuff kings and queens used to wear.”  
“Why? There’s not much we could do with it, and most merchants wouldn’t be able to appreciate the worth.”  
“I’d just like to put something nice on your finger, that’s all.”  
 _Blush_

**Author's Note:**

> Side note: I've never in my life written fanfic before, so go easy on me.


End file.
